Perfect husband (1) [067-052-5.0]

By: Ann Rule

Synopsis:

Another chilling and creepy book from the reigning queen of true-crime,
Ann Rule, who also penned the riveting bestseller Small Sacrifices.

Here, we encounter a charismatic con-artist accused of brutally
bludgeoning his wife and follow his case through to its strangely
redemptive end.

Pocket Books;

ISBN: 0671001132

Copyright 1996

Acknowledgments Thanks go to Cindy Dadonna, David Damore, Frank Goon,
Carol Hunt, Deidre Hunt, Kosta Fotopoulos, Kathy Kelly, Bob Knowland,
Tim Kostidakis, Jack Levin, Father Nicholas Manousakis, Leon Mindlin,
Thelma Mindlin, David Mindlin, Mary Paspalakis, Newman Taylor, Jr Terry
Ramsey, Allison (Ebel) Sylvester, Vinnie Tavernese, John Widdison, Dr.
Keith Wilson, the staff of the Daytona Beach Public Library, the staff
of the Volusia County Court Clerk's office in Daytona Beach, the staff
of the Volusia County Branch Jail, and the staff of the Florida State
Prison, and the Daytona Beach Police Department.

Thanks also to those many people who spoke to me but asked that they
not be mentioned in the book.

Thanks to Russ Galen of the Scott Meredith literary agency.

Thanks, for the third time, to Claire Zion, my editor at Pocket
Books.

And thanks, as usual, to my darling Gail, my editor-in-residence, who
reads pages as they are written and catches my mistakes along the
way.

And, most of all, thanks to Lisa and Dina Paspalakis, for sharing their
lives, their memories, and their pizza with me.  This is their story
more than it is mine.  I only wrote it; they lived it.

 Author's Note.

This is a true story.  The dates, places, and events are all real.

The names are real, except when people asked not to be identified.

The eight pseudonyms appearing in this book are: Vinnie Speziale, Elena
Speziale, Diane Nelson, Mary Mullaley, Thomas Hall, Larry Tarle, Alfred
Fuller, and George McGee.

 A Nice Greek Boy 1isa first became aware of Konstantin Fotopoulos
when one of her aunts slyly informed her one day in May of 1985 that
there was a handsome young man available and she wanted Lisa to meet
him.  Lisa Paspalakis was twenty-five and she had become quite an
attractive young woman, a lithe, brown-eyed, brown-haired American with
a Greek heritage that leaned into her life from every direction.

"You'll like him," Aunt Poupa said.  "His name is Kosta.

He's a nice Greek boy."

"Yeah, yeah, we'll see," Lisa said.  She had heard this before.

"Everybody with pants on looks like a nice Greek boy to you."

This was followed by a series of phone calls from Poupa.

"So?  When do you want to meet this boy?"

By this time Lisa had met too many nice Greek boys.

She was tired.  After graduating cum laude from the University of South
Florida in Tampa in 1982, she had worked for a year in Tampa at one of
the big eight accounting firms, and now, at her father's request, she
was living in Daytona Beach, helping to run the family business,
Joyland Amusement Center, while her brother, Dina, was at college.

Lisa wasn't looking for a man.  All she really needed to relax after a
long day at Joyland was a pack of cigarettes and a good novel.

And on weekends she just wanted to hang out with her friends, most of
whom lived in Tampa, on Florida's west coast.  Tampa, a three-hour
drive across the state, was Lisa's sanctuary.  There she had privacy.

Her Tnampa friends were not plugged into that network of creek
relatives who seemed to know every time she coughed or went to the
bathroom.

On one of her Saturdays in Tampa, Lisa's father, Steno, called.

"Lisa, come home now," he said.  He sounded excited.

Something must be wrong, Lisa thought.  "Dad, who is "That boy.

Kosta.  He's going to be at your Aunt Poupa's today."

"So?"

"So, he's a nice Greek boy.  Come home now, so you can meet him."

"Dad, I'm not coming home from Tampa just so I can meet some guy."

"But he's Greek," her father said.  "He goes to Embryaddle.  The
aeronautical school.  Why waste time?  Let's get started."

"Started?"

"Well you know what I mean, Lisa.  Poupa says he's a "I know.  A nice
Greek boy.  Okay, I'll meet him.  But not now.  Reschedule it.

He's not going anywhere."

Steno, worried that this nice Greek boy might get away before Lisa
could snare him, reluctantly agreed.

On the following Monday night Lisa and her father went to Lenny's
Barbecue Pit on Atlantic Avenue in Daytona Beach, where Kosta worked as
a waiter to help with school expenses.  Kosta greeted them at their
table, shaking Lisa's hand somewhat shyly.  He's as embarrassed by all
of this as I am, Lisa thought.  Kosta was six foot two, with the
straight-backed posture of an army cadet.  Dark-haired Greek Boy and
handsome, he had a sweet face, with innocent Bambi eyes, and lush
lashes that blinked often.  When he shrugged his shoulders he looked
like a teenager.  He would probably have looked even younger, except
for his trim dark mustache, which seemed to hide his feelings.  He
waited on Lisa and Steno graciously, made smiling eyes at Lisa, and was
altogether as charming as a televised game show host.  At one point he
leaned over and, in his thick Greek accent, whispered in Lisa's ear,
"I'm the nice Greek boy.  Are you the nice Greek girl I've heard so
much about?"  He made her laugh.

Lisa, who once had vowed never to marry a man from Greece, had to admit
that this man from Greece was good looking, as advertised, that he was
smart and funny, and that she liked him, even if he was picked out by
Aunt Poupa, who knew nothing of Lisa's taste in men.  His English was
decent, and when he made a mistake in pronunciation, it was adorable.

The morning after the meeting at Lenny's, Poupa called Lisa at the
office.  "What did you think of Kosta?"  she asked.

"He was fine," Lisa said.  "What do you think he thought of me?"

"Wait a minute," Poupa said.  "I'll ask him."

"You'll ask him?"

"He's right here," Poupa said.

"Oh, for goodness' sake, Poupa.  Then you might as well put him on the
phone.  We don't need an interpreter."

Kosta came to the phone, and the two young people made a date to meet
for dinner.  Alone.

They ate dinner later that week at Bennigan's, a funky chain
establishment, which gave the date the informality that Lisa wanted.

Kosta, well mannered as a prince, held Lisa's chair for her and ordered
for her.  He listened patiently while Lisa talked about her family, the
arcade business, her college years in Tampa, and her brother, Dina.

Dina, four years younger, was the light of Lisa's life, and she was
inclined to go on at length about what a great kid he was.

Then Kosta told her about himself.  He was twenty-five years old.

He had grown up in Pefki, a suburb of Athens, he said.  His
grandparents, in the Greek town of Tripoli, aised potatoes.  But his
father had gotten away from potaoes and now worked for Olympic
Airways.

In fact, Kosta's family, while not rich like Lisa's, was well off, and
they lived in a fine house.  Kosta had gone to private school in
,Greece, but after his junior year had made up his mind to finish high
school in the United States.

"I've got four uncles in Chicago," he explained, and he rattled off the
names of the uncles and their wives and their children, not that Lisa
could keep them straight.  They were all named Poulos, a shortened form
of Fotopoulos.

The uncles, he said, had gone to Australia first, where they had all
made money.  Then they had all come to the United States and settled in
Aurora, outside of Chicago.

"They all own restaurants," Kosta said.  He smiled.

"Every Greek in Chicago owns a restaurant."

"I know," Lisa said.  "Every Greek in Daytona owns a sift shop."

So, just before his senior year, Kosta had come to Chicago and moved in
with his uncle Harry.  While he went to Aurora high school and then to
Lewis University, Kosta worked at his uncle's pancake house.

There he washed dishes, cooked, waited on tables.  "I did everything,"
he "aid proudly.

Though his accent was thick and he sometimes stumbled over the odd
English word, or filled in with Greek, Kosta was articulate, and he had
a convincing way of telling even the most mundane story.  His hands
made shapes in the air as he described his hectic schedule for Lisa.

He made it sound to her as if he had been getting up at four every
morning, working long hours at the pancake house, then going to school,
then returning to work until he closed up the pancake house for the
night.

Kosta certainly seemed like A nice Greek Boy one industrious young
man.

Lisa was impressed.

Steno, her father, had been a hard-working immigrant who had come to
America with nothing and forged his own American dream.  It was nice to
see that a young Greek immigrant of her own generation could have
ambition and the same reverence for hard work.

Kosta's real love, he told Lisa, was flying.  His shy brown eyes
sparkled as he described his lifelong love of airplanes.  Flying
fascinated him, so he had come to Daytona Beach to enroll at
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical School, where he hoped to acquire a master's
degree in aeronautical science.

"Of course school and work take up most of my time, so I'm not looking
for any serious relationship with a woman," Kosta said.

Lisa squirmed in her chair.  She hadn't asked him if he was looking for
a serious relationship with a woman.

"The truth is," Kosta said, "I've just broken a girlfriend."

"Broken?"  Lisa said, not understanding his strange turn of phrase.

He explained in Greek.

"Oh."  Lisa laughed.  "You mean broken up.  You've broken up with
her."

"Yes.  Donna," he explained.  He told her that Donna and a few other
people lived in an old house where he rented a room over by Ridgewood
Avenue, a rundown section of Daytona Beach.  Even though they were
"broken, "-and now he said it, knowing it was funny Donna would still
live at the house.

"In a separate bedroom, of course," he said.

"Of course," Lisa said.

Kosta talked for a while about Donna.  Lisa told Kosta that she also
was not looking for romance.  So it was settled.

Neither of them was looking for a long-term relationship.

On that first date Lisa learned little about Kosta's childhood, but one
incident that Kosta related that night did stick in her mind.

One day in Pefki, when Kosta was twelve, he went exploring in an empty
field and found a hand grenade, perhaps a remnant of the German
occupation of Greece.  Instead of surrendering the grenade to the or
his parents, Kosta took it to his cellar, where he lit it.

Lisa was aghast when she heard the story.  "You could have been
killed," she said.  But Kosta smiled proudly.  "No problem," he
explained.  "I know about explosives."  Kosta also mentioned owning one
pistol, but Lisa took little interest.  Guns had never been part of her
family.  In fact, she had never even held a real gun, and the only
shooting she had ever done was against Shootin' Sam, a coin-operated
cowboy dummy at her father's beachfront arcade.

"I just keep the gun for protection," Kosta explained that night at
Bennigan's.

"Protection?"

"You know, like if somebody jumps me or something."

Lisa laughed.  "I don't think anyone is going to jump you in Daytona
Beach."

"You never know," Kosta said.  "Once in Chicago my girlfriend and I
were parking.  Lover's lane.  Four Mexicans Then approached us.  One of
the Mexicans said, "Hey, why don't you come out of there."  I pulled
out my gun and ,ointed it at them and said, "Hey, why don't you come in
here."  They left quickly.  But if I hadn't had the gun, who knows what
might have happened to me, or my girlfriend."

Lisa had to agree that it made sense to have a gun on that particular
night.  Maybe Kosta was right; maybe it was a good idea for a person to
carry a gun for protection.

They talked for a while about people they had dated.

Lisa had gone out with a lot of fellows, she said, but had never been
involved in a serious romance.  Kosta made it sound as if he had
inquired quite a number of desirable young ladies around Chicago.  His
most serious relationship had been with a girl named Karen, in
Chicago.

In fact, at A nice Greek Boy one point he had moved out of his uncle's
house and into an apartment with Karen, and all hell had broken
loose.

"It's a small community," he explained, meaning the network of
Greek-Americans, something Lisa understood very well.  "And they were
embarrassed because, you know, we weren't married.  My sister even flew
in from Greece to try to talk me out of it."  Kosta laughed.  "But I
knew I was right."

I knew I was right.  Lisa realized it was a phrase he had used a couple
of times during dinner.  In fact, now that she thought about it, Kosta
was certain about everything he said.  "I think" or "it is my opinion"
were not phrases that he used.  He left the impression that he could
not be wrong about anything.  She liked it.  The man was sure of
himself.

Over dessert Kosta told Lisa that he liked to fly under bridges.

She took that as hollow boasting, a little something to impress a
lady.

But he promised her he would take her flying.

Though Kosta and Lisa told each other they were not looking for
romance, they saw each other every day during the weeks that followed
their dinner at Bennigan's.  Those weeks could quite nicely be
compressed into one of those gauzily filtered "falling in love"
sequences that fill the screen about halfway through most romantic
movies.  With symphonic music swelling in the distance we see Kosta and
Lisa on a blanket at the beach.  We see Kosta and Lisa strolling in the
park.  We see Kosta and Lisa holding hands at the movies.  We see Kosta
and Lisa, their heads almost touching, carrying on intimate
conversations in romantic restaurants.

Lisa was falling in love.  Like many girls, she had always dreamed of
the perfect husband.  In her adolescent fantasies this man who would
love her so stupendously was always an American like herself, and
usually not a Greek-American.  But in less dreamy moments she'd felt a
subtle pressure on her, an unspoken message from dozens of resolutely
Greek relatives, that said if you marry a man who is not Greek, the
family will be unhappy.  It was her father's dream that Lisa would
marry "a nice Greek boy."  So by the time she was old enough to wear a
wedding dress, Lisa was ready to compromise.  She would find a man who
was wonderful, for her, but one who was Greek, for Dad and her
family.

Now, in the spring of 1985, it seemed that such a man had arrived in
her life.

Kosta was an incredibly attentive suitor.  After a long telehone
conversation with Lisa, Kosta would call back immeeiately to tell her
that he missed her.  He was affectionate as should be.  He was a
good-looking, hard-working, ambitious creek American (that's how she
thought of him, though he was not yet a citizen) who was getting a good
education.

[e was, in a word, perfect.

As promised, Kosta took Lisa flying.

"He took me to Daytona Beach airport, next to Embryiddle," Lisa says.

"He rented a little, single-engine Cheroe there, and he scared the hell
out of me.  He liked to do crazy things like fly real low to the ground
or get up real high and shut off the engine."

Lisa, never a big fan of physical adventure, decided she would live
longer if she did not fly with Kosta, and she live it up.  But not
before acquiring a story to tell.

"One time, it was hysterical, Kosta was flying along, telling me about
how he's got such a great sense of direction.

[e radios in to tell the air controllers he's ready to come for a
landing, and they say, "Okay, where are you located?"  Kosta tells
them, "I'm two point seven knots, or what ever, from the Daytona Beach
airport."  I asked him, What does that mean?"  He says, "I'm landing at
the Daytona Beach airport."  He points down at the airport.  I said,
Costa, that's not the Daytona Beach airport."  He said, "Yes it is."  I
said, "No, it's not, Kosta.  I was born in Daytona, Beach and come into
that airport a lot and that's not it."  Well, he insisted he was
right.

And then the air traffic controller motions and says, "We don't see
you, you must be over the Ormond Beach airport."  It was a riot.

Kosta was over A nice Greek Boy was over the wrong airport.  Mr. 
Always Right was wrong.

"See,' I said, "I told you."" Though Kosta was almost obsessive about
being right, he did not get angry or blow his stack when proven
wrong.

In fact, Lisa noticed right from the beginning that Kosta showed very
little emotion of any type.  Since she was the type to cry easily, or
scream and yell, she liked this in Kosta.  He would always be the calm
and stable one in an emergency, she thought.

There was, however, one disturbing chapter in this storybook romance.

By the time Memorial Day rolled around Lisa and Kosta had become a
pretty serious item, and Donna, the ex-girlfriend, still had not moved
out of Kosta's house.

Lisa, who still had not met Donna, was getting peeved.

"I don't like it one bit," she told one of her cousins, "but what can I
do?"

Kosta explained that Donna was a poor girl from a poor family.

"Have a heart," he said when Lisa lobbied for Donna's eviction.

"I can't just throw her out in the street."

Though Lisa didn't care for the arrangement, she never doubted Kosta.

If he said that he and Donna had separate bedrooms, then they had
separate bedrooms.

In July Lisa and Kosta became engaged.  Lisa's mother, Mary Paspalakis,
threw a party for her daughter and invited a hundred people.  On the
day of the party Kosta had lent his car to Donna, who also worked at
Lenny's Barbecue Pit, so Lisa had to drop Kosta off at the restaurant
so he could pick up his keys.  When Kosta came out of Lenny's, his
collar was smeared with lipstick.

"What's that?"  Lisa said.

"Oh," Kosta said.  He dabbed at the collar with a tissue, trying to
make the pink stain go away.  "Donna's," he said sheepishly.

Lisa felt her body go rigid.  Her temples began throbbing.

"Donna's?"  she said.

"Now calm down, it's nothing," Kosta said.  "She just gave me a little
kiss and said, "I hope you'll be happy with your new wife."

"I'm sure she's thrilled that you're marrying me," Lisa said.

It didn't occur to Lisa that Kosta was lying or that he had encouraged
the kiss.  But she was sure that Donna was being a bitch, putting her
mark on Kosta for all the world, or at least all the employees at
Lenny's, to see.

"I can't believe it," Lisa said.  "Here I am being Miss Nice and she
has the nerve to kiss you.  Well, I'm not going to be nice anymore.

I want her out of there."

A few weeks later Donna was gone.

But not forgotten.  In late July, shortly after Kosta and Lisa returned
from Aurora, where they had visited with Costa's relatives, Lisa drove
her burgundy Porsche to Costa's house one night.  It was an old and
shabby house on the other side of the Halifax River in a neighborhood
of trip bars and all-night hamburger joints, where hookers and dopers
sold their wares.  It was the kind of area that was completely foreign
to Lisa, who had always walked on safe streets east of the Halifax.

She looked forward to the day when Kosta would move out of this
wretched place.

"I've got something I got to tell you," Kosta said.  Their food alone
in the poor yellow light of the kitchen, where plumbing barely
worked.

"What is it?"  she asked.

Kosta stared down at his hands.  "Donna's pregnant."

Lisa said nothing.  She waited for the other shoe to drop.

God, she hated this house.

"She claims the baby is mine," Kosta said.

"Is it?"

"No, of course not, Lisa.  She's due in February.  That would be ten
months after, you know, the last time."

"I see," Lisa said.

Lisa's trust in Kosta was firm and she didn't require much
convincing.

A few days later she told a friend, "The baby's not Kosta's.  I tlked
to people at Lenny's and they've seen her with this guy and that guy.

So she gets pregnant, and who does she want the father to be?  Kosta,
of course.  That's the only way she can get him back."

As Lisa complained more and more about the dump Kosta was living in,
Kosta hinted more and more that he would have to renew his lease in
October unless other arrangements could be made.  Finally, it was
decided that Lisa and Kosta would go ahead with the big wedding,
scheduled for January, but that they would actually marry before a
justice of the peace in October, so that Kosta could move out of his
rented house and into the Paspalakis mansion on the river.

As the wedding date approached, Lisa heard doubts about Kosta from more
and more of her Tampa friends.

Lisa, they said, are you sure you really know this man?

Lisa, they said, you've only known this man a few months, it's not like
you to do something this rash.

This was true.  It was very unlike Lisa to make a major move without
first analyzing it to death.  She was known to everybody as a detail
lady.  People often said to her, "Lisa, you look so carefully at the
details that you might miss the big picture."  But in the matter of
Kosta Fotopoulos, there were many details that Lisa didn't know.

What she did know was that Kosta loved her, that he told her he had
never said that to any other woman, that the family was thrilled about
Kosta, and that she loved him deeply.  That was enough.

Certainly Lisa had her doubts, but they emerged in indirect and playful
ways.  With each new commitment for the wedding she would ask Kosta if
he was sure that he wanted to marry her.

"Now I'm calling the photographer," she would tease.

"Are you still sure you want to get married?"  Kosta would say yes.

"Now my girlfriends are ordering their bridesmaids gowns.  Are you sure
you want to get married?"

 "Yes."

In October of 1985 Lisa Paspalakis and Kosta Fotopoulos were married in
a small civil ceremony.  The bona fide Greek wedding took place the
following January 4 at St. )emetrios Greek Orthodox Church on Halifax
Avenue in Daytona Beach with Father Nicholas "Nick" Manousakis
elebrating the traditional ceremony.

The reception at the Hilton Hotel was a magnificent and pulent
affair.

There were enough Greek guests to stage n invasion of Turkey.

They ate filet mignon, they kissed thebride, they danced the Greek
dances.  By the time the just settled, Augustine "Steno" Paspalakis,
the beaming ither of the bride, had spent about two hundred thousand
the quarters that had been dropped into video games at yland, and for
him it was money well spent.  The family loved Kosta and Kosta loved
the family.  In the videotapes the wedding you can see Kosta, the
attentive groom, lowing in the presence of his lovely bride, and as the
camera pans from cousin to uncle to mother to brother, you can see that
the family was thrilled by it all.  The nice "Greek boy had married the
nice Greek girl.

As the newlyweds danced to Greek music, Kosta held Lisa close.  He felt
strong and masculine against her.  Yes, he had had her doubts, she
thought, but now there was something reassuring about being married,
about having a man to share her life with.  Certainly she was an
independent American female, a woman with a career.  But it was [so
imprinted in her culture that it was good to have a man to protect you,
to take care of you.  And Lisa liked that idea of being protected.  She
would keep her career, but she would also cook supper for her
husband.

And by the time she and Kosta were ready to have babies, mo would be
back from college to help Dad with the business.

Kosta kissed her softly on the cheek and pressed his mouth close to her
ear.  "You know," he said somewhat A Nice Greek Boy devilishly, "You're
only sixty percent of the reason I marriedyou."

"Oh," Lisa said.  "And what's the other forty percent?"

"Your family," Kosta said.

Lisa squeezed him close.  "That's nice," she said.  "I think." 
sciences than others, but at some point we draw the line and say this
conscience is so weak that it is virtually nonexistent.  This is a
sociopath."

The "Most good Boy" in the World chat Lisa Fotopoulos didn't know, and
had no way of knowing, was that the man she had married was a
psychopath, capable of bloody murder.  Or, to put it in more currently
acceptable language, Kosta Fotopoulos was a sociopath.

Dr. Jack Levin, a criminologist, professor of sociology at
Northeastern University in Boston, and the co-author (with James Alan
Fox) of Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace, (Plenum, 1985)
explains.

"A sociopath is what we used to call a psychopath.  "Psychopath' has
fallen out of use because it sounds like psychosis.  Psychosis is an
extreme mental illness, which can take the form of schizophrenia and
include hallucinations, delusions and profound thought disorder.

Psychopathy, or sociopathy, is quite different.  Sociopathy is not a
profound mental illness or disorder.  It is a character or personality
disorder.  What we are talking about is the lack of a conscience.  A
sociopath is a person who just simply does not have the capacity to
feel guilty and feels no remorse if he does the wrong thing.  He might
feel regret, he might wish he hadn't done something if he gets caught,
but he doesn't feel any pangs of guilt.  The sociopath can do the wrong
in the torid things with moral impunity.  The lack of a conscience, of
course, is a continuum.  Some people have weaker conLevin is quick to
point out that the vast majority of sociopaths are not killers, or even
criminals.  They function in normal jobs, though they may be more
successful in jobs where the lack of conscience is an asset.

Sociopaths, generally, are not people who need to kill.  They are
simply people who are able to kill without remorse if killing becomes
expedient.

"Killing is not a big deal for the sociopath," Levin says.

"For him it could be like mutilating a puppet or a doll."

If you gathered Levin and all the rest of the world's experts on
sociopathy in a hotel ballroom and forced them to tell you what they
know, you still would not have the definitive answer to the question:
why was Kosta Fotopoulos a sociopath?  In the matter of understanding
sociopathy we are, says Levin, "still in the dark ages."

Kosta Fotopoulos's childhood, according to his parents, Despina and
Charalampos, was happy and normal.  They say that only Kosta's love of
guns gave them any concern (an obsession which is considerably rarer in
Greece than in the United States), but even that comment barely rises
above the level of small complaint.  Despina, who speaks little
English, says, "My son is the most good boy in the world."

In turn, the members of the Paspalakis family have only praise for the
Fotopouloses and say that the odor of evil was never present when the
families gathered.

"I loved Kosta's family like my own," Lisa says.  "They are wonderful
people.  They were always very kind to me."

It would be comforting to think that the Paspalakises are foolishly
naive and that the Fotopouloses are lying, that Despina and her husband
protect some hideous secret, that Kosta endured some sort of haunted
childhood, was tormented, abused, perhaps tortured in the cellar of his
home in Pefki.  Such a belief would suggest a way to prevent
sociopaths: don't abuse children.  But the truth almost certainly is
that the Fotopouloses, just as much as Lisa, were unaware that a heart
of stone beat within their family.

Kosta probably did have a normal childhood.  Normal childhoods quite
often produce sociopaths, just as loveless and violent ones can produce
kind and compassionate people.

Levin says: "It is a matter of controversy as to why some people are
sociopaths.  There is a growing body of evidence that sociopathy is a
result of a profound disruption, especially during early childhood, so
that the child fails to bond.  That lack of bonding between parent and
child may be at the root of sociopathy.  That could explain why so many
serial killers, all of whom are sociopaths, are adopted.  Of course,
most adopted people grow up to be normal, successful people.

But the ones who are sociopaths might have been abused or abandoned.

Whatever it is, the conjecture is that it starts early, probably in the
first years.

"On the other hand, many psychiatrists believe that some people are
born without a conscience, that it is simply, a matter of wiring.

Biology.  Nobody really knows for sure.

Levin notes that there are millions of sociopaths who do no harm, just
as there are probably millions of sadists who satisfy their needs with
voluntary partners in sadomasochistic sex.  The truly frightening
combination, as Levin sees it, is the sociopath who is also a sadist.

"When a sociopath has a sadistic need he is able to exercise it with
moral impunity," Levin says.  "He doesn't have guilt to stop him."

Unfortunately for Lisa Fotopoulos, the man she had fallen in love with
and married was also a sadist.

But none of that would come out for a while.  For now, still basking in
the glow of a wedding for which four thousand dollars had been spent on
flowers alone, Lisa and Kosta were happy.

The "nost Good Boy" in the N'arid Kosta Fotopoulos had married rich.

Always a good dresser, he was now a better dresser.  He liked to strut
along the boardwalk in his fine new clothes.  At Razzles nightclub on
Seabreeze Boulevard, where he and his pretty new wife often went to
dance and meet friends, he liked to flash the Rolex watch that his new
father-in-law had given him.  Kosta held dearly the image of himself as
a big success and a savvy businessman, though it was baseless.

Except that in many ways marriage to Lisa helped lift Kosta closer to
that image.

Lisa, herself, became for Kosta a measure of his success and proof of
his importance in the world.  When someone would compliment his wife,
tell her she was pretty or smart, Kosta would puff up like a proud
papa.  Later, recalling the kind comment in private with Lisa, Kosta
would shower her with kisses.  A compliment to Lisa was a compliment to
him.  One day a Daytona Beach city commissioner who had done committee
work with Lisa on zoning issues told Kosta that Lisa Fotopoulos was one
smart cookie.  Kosta was so pleased with the compliment that he drove
all the way home to crow about it to Lisa.  It made him so proud of his
wife that he couldn't stop kissing her and hugging her.  Lisa felt
doubly blessed.  Not only did she have a nice compliment, but she had a
husband who appreciated her.

Though Lisa realized even on her wedding day that she didn't know her
groom quite as well as a bride ought to, it was clear in the early
months of the marriage that she had made a wise choice.  Kosta was a
perfect husband.  He often arrived at the door of their three-bedroom
rented town house in Ormond Beach with flowers in his hand.

Kosta remembered the birthdays of all her family members.

Steno and Dina and Mary all got presents.  Kosta played gin rummy with
her father, and video games with her brother.

Kosta even developed a special relationship with Lisa's mother.

Mary Paspalakis is a quiet and trusting woman who grew up in Greece on
the island of Symi.  Devoted to home and family she is, says her
priest, "an old-type Greek."  Mary, who minimized her education in
English so that her American children would learn to speak two
languages, is, says Father Nick, "perhaps a bit simplistic in her
outlook and her perceptions of people.  That is because she is such an
honest person and the honest person tends to see honesty in other
people."

Simplistic or not, Mary did not take immediately to Kosta.

"At first I said to my husband, "I don't really like him,' she says.

"But Steno said he seems like a good boy, it's a good family, and he
will have his master's degree.  We can help him if we need to.

He can marry our daughter and we will have a nice family.

"I didn't like him because I preferred someone who had a profession, an
office.  But after I met his family I started to love him like my own
child.  He always treated me very nice."

Kosta teased Mary Paspalakis with good humor, pretending not to
recognize her voice on the phone, hiding surprises for her behind his
back when he saw her.  He was quick with a quip in two languages.  He
made her smile.  And if Mary so much as hinted that she was low on milk
or sugar, Kosta would be off like a shot to the 7Eleven.  "You want
milk?"  he would say, usually speaking to her in Greek.  "You'll have
milk."

Mary, in turn, looked after Kosta.  When she learned that Kosta loved
tsoureky, a Greek bread, she learned how to make it so that she could
put it on the table whenever her handsome new son-in-law came for
dinner.

If Mary had one secret wish for her daughter's husband, it was that he
would go to church.  St. Demetrios had long been the center of the
Paspalakises' social, as well as spiritual, life.  Steno had for years
been a stalwart of the church.

Lisa and Dina had been in all the youth groups.  Lisa, an accomplished
pianist, had been the church organist from the age of twelve to the age
of sixteen.  Of the in the florid mately 500

Greek-American families in Daytona Beach, 485 had membership in the
Greek Orthodox Church.  The fact that Kosta was not a churchgoer felt
wrong to Mary.  Perhaps when they have children Kosta will go, she told
herself.

Lisa, whose own church attendance had dropped off dramatically with her
marriage and with the demands of a seven-day-a-week business, was
thrilled about the way Kosta was fitting in with her family.  Kosta was
fun to have around.  He made jokes with everybody; he was a very funny
guy.  And, unlike many husbands she could name, Kosta was not
embarrassed to show affection in public.  On the beach in front of the
boardwalk he kissed Lisa.  At parties he held her hand.  Several of the
aunts and female cousins told Lisa they envied her for having such an
attentive and affectionate mate.  "Has he got a brother?"  the single
ones joked.  But Kosta had no brother, only one sister.

Lisa and Kosta, like most newly married couples, talked baby talk,
cooing in each other's ears in bed at night where they sketched out
plans for their careers, the big house they would someday build, and
the children they would bring into the world.  They engaged in mock
arguments about who loved who first.  They snuggled, they gabbed about
their friends, and they made love.

Though the first year of marriage was occasionally punctuated with
spats over silly issues, such as who was entitled to which side of the
closet, Lisa and Kosta got along fine.  Kosta liked to tease, but he
could take teasing, too.

Lisa, for example, often teased Kosta about his mispronunciation of
certain English words.  And he would tease her about how emotional she
got over small things.  The air conditioner would break down and Lisa
would be frantically searching through the Yellow Pages for repairmen
while Kosta would pour himself a lemonade, put his feet up, and say,
"Just calm down and think that it is cool."  In fact, once, to make a
point about the mind's power to screen out discomfort, he took a
lighted cigarette from Lisa, put it on his forearm, and left it there
to show her that he could ignore the pain.

"It's not the end of the world," Kosta would say, when things went
wrong.  "It will get taken care of.  Remain calm at all times."  He
would smile and she would see how silly she was being.  Kosta never got
emotional about small problems and she loved that about him.  And she
knew that he loved her.  He hated the fact that she smoked, and though
she didn't care for the nagging, she appreciated his concern.  She
couldn't give up cigarettes, but she wanted his approval, and for a
while she smoked only in secret.

And they teased each other about cheating.

"Now you better not be cheating on me," Lisa would say.  "Because if I
find out you're cheating on me, I'll leave you."  For Lisa this was not
completely funny.  Her fear of being rejected for another woman was
real and even pretty waitresses flirting with Kosta could cause her
pain.  Cheating sexually was about the worst thing Lisa could imagine a
husband doing.  Still, she smiled when she said these things, and Kosta
smiled back.

"You won't leave me," he would joke.

"No?  Why not?  Because you're so adorable?"

"Because I'll get my gun and shoot you," Kosta would say, his Bambi
eyes shining.  He liked to say such things with a straight face.

"You won't shoot me," Lisa would say, shaking a finger at him.

"I'll be gone too fast for you."

They would laugh over this, and hug, and sometimes fall into bed and
make love.

If there was anything that made the marriage bed less comfortable
during those early months it was the fact that Kosta was unhappy about
having a woman support him.

"It's not right for a man to depend on a woman," he told Lisa.  "I want
to provide for you.  I want to make something of myself."

Lisa found this admirable.  He wants to take care of his family, she
thought.  Though she had always seen herself as a career woman, and she
knew that the family business could certainly include Kosta, she also
knew that it was important to her husband that he have something of his
own.

In June of 1986, when Kosta graduated from EmbryRiddle with a master's
degree in aeronautical science, he wanted to go to work for Olympic
Airways, his father's employer, in Greece.  Lisa had been to Greece
many times and thought it was a great place to visit.  But she wanted
no part of living there.  And Kosta, for all his Greek chauvinism, was
comfortable in America, too.  So Greece was scratched.

Kosta began sending resumes around to General Electric, Pratt &
Whitney, and other big aviation companies.  There were a few nibbles,
but none from cities to which the couple wished to move.  Besides, Lisa
didn't really want to leave Daytona Beach.  Steno needed her to help
run the business.

In time Kosta just stopped applying for work in aviation.

It was decided that Kosta would work, at least for a while, at Joyland,
along with Steno, Lisa, and Dina.

Kosta was an early riser, and Lisa a late sleeper.  So Kosta would come
into Joyland early each morning while Lisa stayed in bed.  Kosta made
change, he repaired broken video games, he puttered around, did a
little of this and a little of that.  He became friendly with other
boardwalk businessmen and they all thought the world of him.

Frank Goon, who operates Mill/Go, a boardwalk arcade with video games
and dodg'em cars, says, "Honest to Pete, Kosta was just the nicest guy,
quiet and polite.  You'd see him all the time on the boardwalk carrying
his briefcase.

Sometimes he'd come by and we'd talk."

Tim Kostidakis, who is Dina Paspalakis's closest friend, owns a gift
shop a block from the boardwalk.

"Kosta joked a lot," Kostidakis remembers.  "I would tease him about
the fact that he read comic books and he would say, "You better watch
out or I'll take out my gun and shoot you,' but he'd be smiling and
kidding while he "aid it.  Kosta was a good talker.  When he wanted to
make point he was very convincing."

Kosta became known as a fellow you could always shoot the breeze with
and he was usually good for a joke or two.

"Did you hear the one about the two Turks walking down the street?

One of them says, "If you can tell me how many apples I've got in this
bag, I'll give you both of them."  The ether says, "Three."

"Wrong,' the first Turk says, "you missed it by two."" Kosta was a
popular figure on the boardwalk.  Thomas O'Neil, a police officer who
included the boardwalk on his beat, says Kosta was "an outgoing,
charismatic individual."

Others found him "charming," "delightful," "smart," and "funny."

Kosta was all of these, and he was also a man who saw himself as a
chief, not an Indian, so he took little joy in his duties at the
arcade.  Most mornings Lisa would arrive in the office around eleven
and by twelve-thirty Kosta would be off to the bank to make the daily
Joyland deposit, which he carried in a briefcase.  Almost invariably,
he would be gone for hours.

Lisa was never quite sure where Kosta went on these afternoon
excursions, but she thought it better to have Kosta happily roaming
around town than miserably sweeping floors or handing out quarters at
Joyland.  Besides, she felt more than a little guilty about the fact
that Kosta was stuck in Daytona Beach because of her devotion to her
father.  Still, her husband's mysterious excursions caused her some
anxiety.

"Kosta," she said, when her husband showed up at four in the afternoon,
"you went to the bank four hours ago.

What happened?"

"Oh, I ran into Peter Kouracos," or this one or that one, "and we got
to chatting," or "we had some lunch."  It was always something.

In time Kosta developed the habit of calling Lisa in the afternoon and
announcing "I'm at peter's," or "I'm at Angelo's" and the male friend
in question would shout into the phone, "Hi, Lisa, how are you?"

Lisa was never quite sure whether Kosta had been with his friend all
along, or had swung by on his way back from some secret assignation to
create an alibi.  Sometimes she worried that Kosta really might be
fooling around with women.  But it seemed unlikely.  Lisa had a million
friends in Volusia County, many of them nosey as beagles, and not one
ever hinted that Kosta had been seen with another woman.

When Kosta did work at Joyland, he was something less than the prudent
businessman he imagined himself to be.

Dina Paspalakis, who had graduated with honors from the University of
South Florida and returned to work at Joyland around the time that
Kosta was leaving EmbryRiddle, recalls, "Whenever Lisa and I went to
lunch, we would give a few hundred dollars in quarters to one of our
employees for making change, and of course, we would write down the
amount.  But when Kosta would give out the quarters he would never
write it down.  He could be careless like that.  One morning Lisa was
talking to the snack bar manager.  He asked her if she wanted the five
hundred dollars in quarters that was in his freezer.  What five
hundred?  she asked.  "The five hundred dollars Kosta gave me to hold
for him in the freezer.  He forgot to ask for them back."  When Lisa
asked Kosta about it Kosta said, "Oh yeah."" Though Kosta kept his own
hours, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was a Joyland employee,
not an owner.  He was getting a paycheck, three hundred dollars a week,
but he had no legal claim on the business.  It was Kosta's dream that
his father-in-law, Steno, would see that a man shouldn't be working for
his own wife and make the proper arrangements.  Steno, as Kosta saw it,
should regard Kosta as a second son and make him an equal inheritor of
all that Steno had acquired.  But Steno, fond as he was of his son
in-law, and despite the fact that he and Kosta spent long and raucous
hours together playing gin rummy, was not so inclined.  The papers he
had signed, which made Lisa and Dina the inheritors of his business,
were not changed just because Lisa had gotten married, even if it was
to a nice Greek boy.

So Kosta Fotopoulos was frustrated.  He was a man who needed to do
well.  From the very beginning Kosta was intent on achieving success by
having a business of his own.  He could not hear about a business being
for sale without thinking he might want to buy it.  "If General Motors
were for sale," Lisa once quipped, "Kosta would want to buy it."  His
plans were legion and they were grandiose.  There was the plan for
Kosta and his friend Peter Kouracos to manufacture and market their own
bullets.

Lisa thought this was hysterical.  "Let me see now," she said, "I need
some bullets.  Now, do I want some Winchester or Remington, or .

. . no, how about some "Kosta and Peter' bullets, do you have some of
those?"  Equally amusing to Lisa was Kosta's plan to market automatic
cracker dispensers for the home, and his plan for an automatic
fertilizer.

If some of Kosta's plans were unorthodox, others were viable, or at
least would have been in the hands of a capable businessman.  There
were restaurants he could buy, stores he could open, services he could
operate.  And with each new plan Kosta would be as enthusiastic and as
innocent as Mickey Rooney saying to Judy Garland, "Hey, I got an idea,
we could put on a show."  Unfortunately, Kosta had no money of his own,
and his great business ventures always called for financing from Steno,
or Dina, or Lisa.

The money was not forthcoming, because as much as the family admired
Kosta's zeal, it was clear that Kosta was no businessman.

Though he was quick to count the imagined profits, Kosta gave little
thought to details like acquiring licenses, witholding taxes,
establishing employee benefits, incorporating or filling out the myriad
forms that land in the mailbox of anybody who tries to set up shop on a
public street.  To Lisa, the accountant, "Little Miss Detail,"
attention to these things was at the heart of good business sense, and
she was always shocked to realize Kosta thought that the rules and
regulations that governed small businesses did not apply to him.

"There was one business," Lisa recalls, "that was obviously losing
money.  They gave us financial statements, but the guy says don't go by
them, I've been skimming money off the top.  Kosta falls for that, and
I tried to tell him, Kosta, anybody who's selling a losing business is
going to tell you that.  The guy had checks bouncing all over the state
and he had an outrageous amount in bank service charges, and he was
saying to Kosta, "Oh, but you should see how much I really make."  So I
said to Kosta, people who are making money don't have checks
bouncing.

You want me to help you evaluate the business?  He says, ah, what do
you know?  I said, well, I'm a CPA, people pay me money for this sort
of thing.  I tried to tell him, and he would just say, "Oh, you don't
know what you're talking about."  He always had to be right."

One of Kosta's moneymaking schemes involved the purchasing of stock
options.  For several months Kosta and Peter Kouracos carried on like
Donald Trump and Ted Turner.  They read The Wall Street Journal
religiously.  They exchanged financial information the way other guys
might fill in each other on football scores.  In their separate homes,
they would sit for hours in front of the television watching the
financial news, and they would call each other up, always greeting one
another with "Hey, bra."  (Though this greeting began as a diminutive
for "brother," it eventually turned to "Brosky," for Ivan Boesky, the
Wall Street crook who was something of a hero to the men.  Boesky,
incidentally, is a name that Jack Levin mentions when he wants to make
the point that sociopaths do well in jobs wherein their lack of
conscience is an asset.) On the phone Kosta and Peter would tell each
other what they had learned.  At the end of the year, when Lisa sat
down to evaluate all the ,tock option transactions that the two men had
made, she :liscovered that all their efforts had earned them about two
thousand bucks, which they would have had to pay to [heir certified
public accountant if she were not married to one of them.

Though Kosta had not achieved the success he expected for himself, he
did what he could to project an image of success to his friends and
boardwalk associates.  Even the Rolex from Steno was not enough, and
soon after he received it he traded it in for a Presidential, a Rolex
of higher rank.

Kosta bought a brand-new black BMW during the first year of their
marriage.  He preened over the BMW as if he had made it by hand, and
when he drove past people he knew, he would honk the horn so that they
could see him tooling along.  When friends came to visit from Chicago,
Kosta would ask them to gather around his car to have their picture
taken.  When he drove the BMW north with Lisa on a trip to Chicago and
rammed it into a guardrail on a slippery exit ramp he was
uncharacteristically irate.

"What are you screaming and yelling about?"  Lisa asked him on that
snowy exit ramp.  "Nobody was hurt.  It's only a car."  It was one of
the few times Kosta had shown emotion.

"You don't understand," Kosta said.  "I wanted to show it off to my
uncles."

Lisa, who had been disheartened as a teenager to discover she became
more popular after her father bought her a Pontiac Trans Am, despised
the idea of trying to impress people with wealth.  She always wore
simple jewelry and clothes that were chosen for comfort, not because
they looked expensive.  So she was never at ease with Kosta's need to
be showy.

"I was brought up not to be a show-off," Lisa says.  "In fact, when I
was a kid I didn't even realize we had anything more than anybody
else.

We had a house on the river, my cousin had a house on the river.  I
didn't know 2b The house on the river was more expensive than a house
that was not on the river.

When we went to Greece to visit family, people would say, "Lisa, you're
lucky, you get to go to Greece."  But to me it was the same as when
they went up north to visit their family.  So I wasn't brought up to
brag about anything.  All of a sudden I see my husband bragging about
owning a BMW.  It was kind of embarrassing."

Lisa was sure the bragging would not last.  He's just insecure, she
told herself.  He'll get over this when he has a business of his own.

Jack Levin would have disagreed.  "This need to impress other people
with status symbols is typical of the sociopath," Levin says.

"Sociopaths are masters at making an impression on other people and
status symbols and conspicuous consumption are the way they do it."

The business of his own that Kosta wanted most was the Denny's project
that obsessed him in the summer of 1987.

In June of that year Lisa's parents flew to Greece for an extended
visit.  Kosta and Lisa moved out of their Ormond Beach town house and
into the Paspalakis house at 2505 North Halifax Avenue.  It was a big
white house with a long horseshoe-shaped driveway and four Greek
columns surrounding the wide front double door.  It was a spacious
home, expensively furnished in the Mediterranean style, lots of red
velvet cushions and gilded frames and color everywhere.  Kosta had
always liked the house.  Certainly to live in such a place, situated as
it was on the Halifax River with a wide front lawn and a swimming pool
in the back, reflected well on him.

Lisa's brother, Dina, still lived there, but there was plenty of
room.

It seemed only sensible that Kosta and Lisa might as well get the use
of the place and save some of that rent money, which they could put
toward their own house, the one they planned to build in Ormond
Beach.

For many years there had been a restaurant called Bali's, on Broadway,
two blocks from the boardwalk area.  When Lisa was growing up, Bali's
had been the place to eat and dance on the beach side.

Bali's had gone out of business, and it seemed that no matter what kind
of restaurant moved into the location, the crowds never came.

Now, in the summer of 1987, when Kosta heard that the building was for
sale, he carried on as if someone had died and left him a fortune.

This, he said, was his big opportunity.  He would buy the place,
refurbish it, and turn it into a Denny's franchise restaurant.  It
would be a twenty-four-hour restaurant.  With tourists roaming the
streets until all hours of the night, the place would make a fortune.

"Kosta was more excited about this than any of his other projects,"
says Dina Paspalakis.  "He was always talking about it, discussing the
menu, the decor, how much money it would make.  But Kosta didn't have
any money and the whole thing was going to cost over nine hundred
thousand dollars.  He wanted us to finance it, but my family was not
going to jeopardize almost a million bucks.  I figured that if the
restaurant grossed a million, two hundred thousand, even with a
conservative figure for expenses, it would clear about sixty thousand
dollars.  That was not a smart business move in my opinion, not with a
twenty-four-hour operation, which is a constant hassle.  Not only that,
but this particular location, for some reason, had never been real
successful after Bali's.  A lot of other places had gone under."

Lisa, as usual, was torn.  Though Kosta's business visions sometimes
exasperated her, they also made her proud.  She found it admirable that
Kosta wanted to build his own fortune so he could support his wife, and
if ever she suspected that Kosta had married her as a meal ticket,
those fears were vanquished by the zeal with which he unveiled each new
project, especially this one.  She felt sorry for Kosta.  He so
desperately wanted to be a businessman, but he was all image and
enthusiasm and had little understanding of the day-to-day financial
realities.  In the end she had to agree with Dina.  This was not a good
deal.

Kosta, however, was determined.  He was not to be dissuaded by his
brother-in-law and his wife, both of whom were accountants and business
operators.  He was desperate to have this restaurant and he was hopeful
that his father-in-law would help.  He called Steno in Greece to ask
him to cosign for several hundred thousand dollars in loans.

"I've got a great location on Broadway," Kosta said.

"I hope it's not the old Bali's restaurant," Steno said from Greece.

"That place is a loser."

Kosta was crushed.  But he made his pitch for the money.

He told Steno how much he wanted it, how he would work hard, how he
would set it up.  But Steno agreed with Lisa and Dina.  It was a bad
investment.  He turned Kosta down.

Shortly after that, Steno and Mary returned from Greece.

Steno, feeling bad that he had rejected Kosta, lent Kosta ten thousand
dollars and told him to try to make something of his own with it.  But
Kosta was still depressed.

"I've never seen Kosta so devastated as when my father turned him down
on the Denny's deal," Dina says.  "He took it very hard."

Five weeks after refusing to finance Kosta, Steno Paspalakis suddenly
died.

Steno her father's name was Augustine, but everybody called him
Steno.

They spelled it with an e even though it sounded just like Dina, her
brother's name.  He was a big man, big like a bear, and his voice when
he got excited sounded like summer thunder.  When Lisa was a little
girl, Steno took her to the beach.  He lifted her in his strong hands
and hoisted her high above his head.  "The Atlantic Ocean," he
announced.  Even then she sensed the awe in his voice.  She thought she
could see all the way to Greece.

Then Steno spun her around until she had looked in every direction.

"Elevator coming down," he said, and he lowered her to the hard sand.

He pointed both ways.

"This, Lisa," he said, "is the world's most famous beach."

Lisa knew it was true, because whenever she twirled the postcard
carousel at the sundry store on the boardwalk, many of the colorful
pictures of Daytona Beach said The World's Most Famous Beach.

"They used to race cars," Steno told her.  "Right here."

He stooped down and poked a finger in the sand.  "See.  It Steno is
hard.  So they could race.  All the way from Granada Avenue in Ormond,"
he told her.  "For a dozen miles they would race.  Vrooni, i'roorri."

He made racing noises.  "Then they would turn around and drive the
other way.  Vroom.

Vroom."

Back then, Lisa thought her daddy had seen it all, that he had stood
out on the sand waving at the drivers as their cars roared by.

Sometimes she imagined him behind the wheel, his car in the lead,
spitting up sand all the way to Daytona Beach and all the way back to
Ormond.  But later, when he told her about his coming to America, she
understood that when Mr. Oldsmobile and the others were racing cars,
her father was just a boy growing up in Greece.

"I grew up on Khalki," he said one night, holding Lisa on his knees.

Actually, he said it many nights, but for Lisa it all compressed into a
single memory of her dad.  "It is a small island in Greece," he told
her.  "No water, no electricity.  And worst of all," he said, raising a
hand dramatically in the air, "no Beatles."

This was the mid-sixties and little Lisa thought that was funny.

He told her that when he was a young man he left his village and hooked
passage on a westbound ship that took him across the Atlantic.

He came first to Venezuela, then to Texas, where he had relatives who
had come over a few years earlier.  In 1955 he went back to Greece to
marry Mary Manousakis.

"Your mama," he said.  "This was a wedding that had been planned since
we were both your age."

But Steno didn't bring Mama to America, not right away.

"I wanted to be able to say first, "I have made something of myself.""
Steno came back to America alone.  He worked in Charleston.

"In South Carolina," he explained.  There some other Paspalakises had
settled.  By 1957, three years before Lisa was born, Steno owned a bar
in Charleston and had become a U.S. citizen.  He sent for Mary.

"But we got tired of Charleston," he told his daughter.

"So we came here like the others.  The sunshine.  The ocean.  The fine
fishing waters.  It reminded us of home.

We were going to build houses, my cousins and me.  But after we built
the first house, this one you live in, your mother and I wanted to live
in it."

He paused then, gazed off into space.  "I fell in love with my own
creation," he said to Lisa.  "Just like Pygmalion."

"Pig who?"  Lisa asked.

Steno smiled.  "It's a myth," he said.  He laughed.  "Not even
Greek."

So Steno and his cousins built no more houses.  The year before Lisa
was born, Steno rented a snack bar on the boardwalk.  Then, after the
baby was born, he rented the Satelite game arcade on the boardwalk and
renamed it Funorama.

"And that," Steno explained, with a big laugh and a final bounce of his
knees, "is how I got my start in America running my arcades and snack
bar."

Lisa heard the stories many times about how Steno and the uncles and
the aunts and the cousins came over from Greece.  "Did I ever tell you
about how your uncle Demitrius came to America?"  Steno would say.

"Nope," Lisa would say.  Up on the knees she would go and Steno would
wrap his wide arms around her and lean down and tell her one more story
about a Greek immigrant making good in America.

So, for Lisa Paspalakis, childhood was safe and it was secure.

Daddy worked on the boardwalk and that was a wonderful place.

People came from all over the country just to drive on the beach or
play games at the arcades, or throw baseballs at fake milk bottles at
the other end down by the bandshell, and, of course, to eat hot dogs at
her father's snack bar.

In the silvery hours of each early morning Lisa listened for the sounds
of her father leaving his bed, talking in Greek to Ma at the breakfast
table, and then leaving the Steno house to open the boardwalk snack
bar.  Her father worked hard and she knew what that meant.

"Lisa," he often told her, "if you work hard, the rewards will come."

Little Lisa burrowed down in her bed and thought about those rewards.

At three each afternoon Dad came home.  "What a morning," he would say
in his rich baritone voice, a voice that was frightening to some, but
music to Lisa.  "What a morning."  Lisa's mother would cook pastitsio
or moussaka for lunch and then Steno, not one to forsake a fine Greek
tradition like to sleep") snoozed for three hours.  By seven o'clock,
he was off again to work at the snack bar until one in the morning.

By 1969, when he was also operating the Mardi Gras Fun Center, Steno at
one time or another had opened the gate on just about every snack bar
on the boardwalk.  He prospered, and when people asked him what it was
all for, he smiled broadly.  "Send my kids to college," he would say.

"Send my kids to college."

By the time Lisa was in the fourth grade her father had made enough
money to buy a few blocks of local property.

But when he got the chance to buy the Joyland Amusement Center he sold
everything so he could make a down payment.

This was before the advent of the computer chip and Joyland was mostly
pinball machines, Skee-Ball, pokerino, and "21."  Lisa was nine and her
favorite attraction was a mechanical fast-draw cowboy dummy by the name
of Shootin' Sam, who would ridicule her every time he beat her to the
draw, which was every time she went up against him.  "Better luck next
time, pardner, and don't forget to wear your glasses," Sam would say.

Little Lisa thought this was the biggest riot and she would giggle
hysterically long after Shootin' Sam had put down his six-shooter and
gone dark.

If Lisa wasn't much of a cowpoke, there were signs in early childhood
that she did have the makings of a savvy businesswoman.

Though her father would gladly have spoiled her with any number of
toys, what young Lisa loved most was playing with an adding machine.

Steno would come home at night, clutching his stack of business
bills.

"Here, honey," he would say, "you think you could add these up for
me?"

And Lisa would joyously add the figures up over and over, taking great
delight in the fact that the total was always the same.  By the time
Lisa entered high school she knew she wanted to be in business, and
after her first accounting course her heart was set on being an
accountant.  In accounting, as in life, she loved the idea of things
being balanced, organized.

Though Steno had been in the arcade business for years before he bought
Joyland, he seemed to stand a little taller after that purchase.

Now he was entrenched.  No longer a renter, he was an owner.  As time
passed, the Joyland became for him a symbol of all that he had
accomplished in America.  It was not simply an investment.  And
operating it was certainly not just a job.  It was his legacy.  Joyland
was something he could never sell.  Just as some people passed down a
watch or a ring to their children, Steno would pass the Joyland
Amusement Center down to his, and in that he took great pride.

Steno, who always spoke Greek at home, was prosperous and content.

Most of the other businessmen on the boardwalk were Greek, and with
those who weren't, Steno often joked that if they wanted to stick
around they had to learn the Greek dances.  He had a good business, a
wife he loved, and children he adored.  Moreover, he had the extended
Greek community of brothers, cousins, nephews and nieces with their
husbands and wives, and their cousins and nephews and nieces.  He was a
Greek and he was an American and he rarely longed for the homeland.

But, no less clannish than other immigrants, Steno did look forward to
the day when his daughter would marry a nice Greek boy, and his son a
nice Greek girl.

Steno Paspalakis was not a man to throw curveballs.  If he Steno didn't
like you, you knew it.  And if he did like you.  . . well, you weren't
always so sure.  He was gruff and he was direct.  Those who knew him
well never took his grumbling too seriously, but to the timid he was a
daunting figure.

Some of the salesmen who called on boardwalk businessmen were scared to
death of him.  He was not a man to stand on ceremony.  If a salesman
arrived when Steno preferred solitude, he would shout, "Go away, I'm
busy."  In time, however, the salesmen learned how to win Steno's
attention and his affection.  They would speak to Lisa, who, along with
her brother, spent many hours as a teenager working at Joyland.

"You want my dad to look at your sample books, you want him to like
you?"  Lisa would say.  "You've got to say nice things about his
daughter."

The salesmen would go in proclaiming, "Boy that's one smart daughter
you got there Mr.  Paspalakis.  And pretty!

Just as pretty as a picture.  You are one lucky man."

"You like my Lisa?"  Steno would say.  The eyes would light up, the
chest would puff out with pride.  "You think she's pretty and smart?

You're all right!  Come on in, show me what you got."

By 1977 Steno and two of his cousins had bought an old hotel on
Atlantic Avenue, razed it, and built the Circus Gift Shop.  Pleased
with the business, Steno decided to build another gift shop on his
boardwalk property.  He yanked out a few pinball machines and
partitioned off a narrow section at the south end of Joyland.  There he
installed a gift shop where tourists could buy T-shirts with alligators
and racing cars on them, painted seashells, postcards of The World's
Most Famous Beach, and bikinis.  He named the new store Lisa's Gift
Shop, after his pride and joy.

While the gift shops were enterprises that earned money, they were not
as dear to Steno's heart as the arcades, and he looked at the need for
additional management as a burden.  Steno, who was never entirely
comfortable turning over authority to outsiders, asked his smart and
pretty daughter to manage the shop.  "After all," he argued, "it is
named after you."  She was sixteen.

Still in high school, Lisa took over the gift shop business.

she placed the orders, counted the inventory, hired and "red the help,
and banked the receipts.  Though the work was ten times more exhausting
and demanding than she had imagined it would be when she signed on,
Lisa took on the business like a porpoise to the sea.

Augustine aspalakis, unfortunately, did not share Lisa's iffinity for
the finer points of bookkeeping.  He once told his daughter, "What I
know about money is I take some in and I put it in the safe.  In the
morning I take the money out of the safe and I put it in the bank."

Steno was a man who could add up any column of figures in his head, but
start talking debits and ledgers with him and his eyes would glaze
over.  To him accounting meant you had to turn over all your receipts
and various scraps of paper to someone who had gone to college to learn
about such things, and then you trusted him.

By the early seventies Steno's business tax records were a horror.

His own bad habits, combined with incompetent accounting help, resulted
in his being miles behind on his income taxes.  In 1975 he was taken to
court for tax evasion.

The prosecution, acknowledging that Steno was an honest, if
unsophisticated, businessman, did not ask for jail time.

The judge, however, was less forgiving.  perhaps as a warning to other
well-meaning businessmen, the judge told Steno he would have to spend
three months in jail at Eglin Air Force base, on the Florida panhandle,
beginning in September, after the busy season.

The sentence was not a harsh one.  Eglin was a country club kind of
jail, with no guns, no bars, and no searching of visitors.  In fact, it
was at Eglin during this same period that Howard Hunt did his penance
in connection with the Watergate scandal.

Nonetheless, the tax evasion incident had enormous impact on the
family, most keenly on Lisa, who was then a teenager trying to find her
identity among her peers.  For starters, her father was sentenced on a
slow news day, so the story of a small-time Daytona Beach boardwalk
businessman given a slight sentence for minor tax evasion made the
newspapers and the local TV.  Steno had just built for his family the
gorgeous new house on the Halifax River, and before the furniture was
even in place reporters were crowding the doorstep and cameramen were
peeking in windows.  It was not the kind of attention a teenage girl
likes brought to herself.

A week before Steno was to enter the jail, Mary Paspalakis took her son
and her daughter to Pensacola, where they rented a small apartment near
the jail so they could visit Steno on Saturdays and Sundays.  On those
weekend days Mary and the kids would go off to the jail, carting
baskets that contained enough food to feed an army, and the family
would stay together from eight in the morning until five in the
afternoon.  When the time came for his wife and children to leave,
Steno would put his arms out for one last bearish hug and, holding back
the tears, would say, "Don't leave until I have a chance to get to the
fence, so I can wave good-bye."

Out to the fence the family would go, and there would be father once
again separated from them by steel.  As the family moved away, Lisa
would glance back at her dad after every step.  Steno would stand all
alone, waving until his wife and children were out of sight.  It broke
Lisa's heart every time.  In her life there had been no more touching
sight than that of her father being left behind, waving good-bye.  It
was an image that became so deeply imbedded in Lisa's mind that even
years later when she was grown up, the memory of it would always bring
tears to her eyes.

Though her dad ate well and was treated decently, it was profoundly sad
to Lisa that she had a father who she could not go to whenever she
wanted to, and that experience set in her an abiding fear of anything
illegal.  You break the law and this is what happens, she thought.  She
vowed that she would never do anything unlawful and she would never
associate with anybody who did.

Steno Paspalakis lived most of his adult life as a solid citizen of two
worlds, Daytona Beach and the Greek community of Daytona Beach.

Daytona Beach, a hundred miles south of Jacksonville on Florida's east
coast, is a city of moderation.  It doesn't have Miami's crime rate.

It doesn't have Orlando's Disney World.  Its winters, mild and short,
make it a lot warmer than New York in February.  And its summers, with
breezes shifting from the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Halifax
River on the other, make it a lot cooler than Fort Lauderdale in
July.

Which is why Daytona Beach draws tourists all year-round and, in fact,
has more visitors in summer than in winter.

Thousands of people from all over the world come to Daytona Beach to
fish, boat, surf, jet-ski, and bake on the beach.

Daytona Beach (also referred to simply as "Daytona") is best known for
two things: its beach, and the auto races that began on the beach years
ago and are now run at the famous Daytona International Speedway.

It's the chamber of commerce that first declared it The World's Most
Famous Beach, and that ubiquitous phrase cannot be avoided even by the
most passive of tourists.  It is proclaimed on postcards, towels,
brochures, billboards, and souvenirs of every type.  The beach, hard
white sand firmly packed by the tides, slopes at a small angle into the
Atlantic Ocean and runs for twenty-three continuous miles.  As wide as
five hundred feet in places, the sand is an oceanside boulevard where
tourists walk, or ride on rented bicycles known as beach cruisers, or
zip along on mopeds, or, for a small beach access fee, drive their own
cars.  The speed limit on the beach is ten miles per hour.

Along the World's Most Famous Beach, above the seawall, is the strip
known as the boardwalk.  The boardwalk, which began in the Forties with
a couple of bowling alleys, is not really a boardwalk at all, just a
cement walkway about as wide as a two-lane blacktop, and about twice
the length of a city block.  The boardwalk is lined with old, riotously
colored stores, all fairly weathered by the wind that skates off the
Atlantic.  The strip is a life-sized cartoon of video game arcades,
souvenir shops, miniature golf courses, and narrow eateries where you
have to squeeze in sideways to take a stool at the counter.  There is
Walkin Charlie's (Games-Prizes-Snack Bar), The Pit Stop
(BeerPool-Games), Mardi Gras Fun Center, Fun and Fascination, Midway
Fun Fair, Pizza King, and, of course, Lisa's Gift Shop and Joyland
Amusement Center.

Though they don't face the ocean, Main Street on the north and Ocean
Avenue parallel to the boardwalk on the west are also loosely referred
to as the boardwalk.  These streets are filled with more gift shops,
casual clothing stores, and a few more bars, including one with "exotic
dancers," where college boys go to watch sad-eyed girls dance naked
(well, almost naked) for tips that are shoved into their garters.

For decades the boardwalk has been a popular vacation spot.  If the
Miami Beach crowd is borscht belt and New York deli, this one is more
grits and motor oil, at least when the cars are racing.  Daytona Beach
does a brisk family vacation business, and school holidays help to fill
hotel rooms along Atlantic Avenue.  But Daytona Beach tourism to a
large extent revolves around three events: the auto races at the
Daytona International Speedway, the motorcycle races at the speedway,
and spring break.  And with few exceptions, beach businesspeople will
tell you that the best behaved people are the motorcycle crowd and the
worst are the college students.

While Daytona Beach is a sunny haven for people of all ages, most of
the people who eat hush puppies on the boardwalk and plug quarters into
the video games are young.  There are the locustlike swarms of college
students who in recent years, for better or worse, have anointed
Daytona Beach as spring break headquarters.  There are the cal kids who
head for the beach every chance they get.

and despite the best efforts of local businesspeople to keep them out
there are the lowlifes .  . . teenaged runaways and rifters.  When kids
on the East Coast run away they go to lorida and Daytona Beach gets its
share.  Like Forty-second treet in New York and the Sunset Strip in Los
Angeles, the boardwalk at Daytona Beach has become a stopping place for
America's lost youths, many of whom are quite dangerous.

So this was the working world of Steno Paspalakis, a world where
shoptalk meant sitting at the counter of the nock bar in Joyland with
one of the other boardwalk business owners and discussing the upcoming
Speed Week, or the arrival of the college students, or the new machine
that auld roll quarters faster than the old one.

Steno's other world was the Greek community, which is more or less
synonymous with the Greek Orthodox Church.

ninety-eight percent of Greeks are Greek Orthodox, and most all of
Daytona's Greeks are members of St.  Demetrios.

Though many of the area's Greeks are descended from the 1,200

Greeks who settled in New Smyrna Beach south )f Daytona two hundred
years ago, most are not.

"There is not a line of continuity that extends back to those Greeks,"
says Father Nick Manousakis.  "The Greeks in Daytona today came on
their own in recent generations, or were brought over by relatives.

They were drawn here by the tourism.  Many Greeks are involved with the
tourist industry, especially gift shops.  And probably the biggest
withdraw for Greeks to this area is the climate and the ocean."

(Father Nick is no doubt correct that a climate similar to that of
Greece was the magnet that attracted Greek immigrants to Daytona, which
also explains the large Greek communities in St. Augustine, Florida,
and Santa Barbara, California.  But he notes with interest the fact
that the largest Greek community west of the Mississippi is in, of all
places, Salt Lake City, Utah.) Steno Augustine Paspalakis was typical
of these people.  He was, says Father Nick, everything a Greek should
be.

"I took a very personal liking to this man," Father Nick says.

"He was very industrious and he had a strong kinship to his ethnic
roots, although he resided in America.

He was a man of great pride and high values, which is characteristic of
the Greek mentality.  He was part of a very close family, and that is
typically Greek.  Among Greeks there is a lot of respect for the
family, and a high regard for the church.  The families are extended
families, with the uncles and the aunts and cousins all in close touch
with each other.  The Paspalakises have many relatives here, to be
sure."

Steno liked to eat Greek food, dance Greek dances, and celebrate Greek
holy days.  Perhaps his favorite time of the year was November, when
the Greek Festival was held.

The Greek Festival is a cultural festival, not a religious one, and it
is the largest ethnic festival of the year in Volusia County.

It is the main fund-raiser of the year for St. Demetrios, and people
come from miles around to buy Greek food and crafts at the church and
activities center, which is on Halifax less than a mile from the
Paspalakis house.  The festival has always been a major yearly event in
the life of the Paspalakises, and the family always donated its time to
work there.

In 1987 the festival was held during the third week of November, the
weekend of another major event for the family: Kosta's becoming a
citizen.  It would turn out to be a weekend of great tragedy.  Lisa
recalls: "The day that Kosta was to become a U.S. citizen Dad woke up
all excited.  This was a very big day to him.  But he wasn't feeling
well.  He had a pain in his lower back.

We drove over to the courthouse in Deland, where Kosta would take the
oath of citizenship, Dad, me, and my mother and Kosta.  Dina had to
stay and take care of the store.  At the courthouse there was a
ceremony, with women taking pictures and handing out little flags.  Dad
was so proud that Kosta was becoming a citizen.  To him this was a
major accomplishment.  Before the ceremony we had to sit separate from
Kosta because he was with all the other people who were becoming
citizens.  Dad was having trouble sitting because of the pain, but
there was a baby in front of us and Dad was having a blast playing with
the baby.

"After the ceremony Dad said, "Let's go to lunch, we'll celebrate."  We
went to a restaurant in Deland, but when we got there Dad said, "I
don't feel well,' and you could see that he didn't look well.  Kosta
had gone off to make a phone call.  To check on the store, he said.

Dad looked like he was in pain.  I said, "Dad, if you don't feel well,
let's go home, we're leaving now.  My dad was always the type to say,
No, no, it's okay, I'll be all right.  But now he looked at me and he
said, "Okay."  So I knew that he was really hurting.  I ran up to the
lady at the reception area and asked her to call an ambulance, but Dad
said, "No."  He said, "I don't want to ruin this special day."  I could
tell from the expression on his face that there was something really
wrong.  Dad wasn't the kind of person to complain.

So we didn't get an ambulance, but the woman gave me directions to the
hospital in Deland.  So we got out to the car.  And there's Kosta
across the street.  I said, "What are you doing?"  He goes, "Oh, the
phone over there wasn't working,' or something.  I said, "Come on, my
Dad's sick and we're going to the hospital."  When we got to the
hospital Dad said he was feeling a little better and he wanted to go to
Daytona, to Halifax Memorial Hospital, where his doctor was.

"When we got to Halifax Dad's doctor was out to lunch, so we made an
appointment for two o'clock and we ended up at Morrison's cafeteria.

I was getting nervous, I guess, and I didn't want to wait until two.

So I drove Dad up to the hospital in Ormond Beach.  When we finally did
see a doctor he said that Dad probably just bumped himself in the
middle of the night and it was probably nothing.  But he told Dad to
rest and he suggested that Dad not go to the Greek Festival that
night.

Dad was disappointed, but he was the kind who would do what the doctor
said.

"At six o'clock Mom and I were scheduled for work at the festival, Mom
in the food line and me at the T-shirt booth.  Kosta had already gone
to work at Joyland.  Dad says, "Don't worry about me, I'll be all
right, I feel much better."  He says, "You guys go."

"When we got to the festival they didn't need me to work yet.

They said just wait a while, so I said, "Do I have time to have
dinner?"  By that time Dina had gotten to the festival.  I was sitting
with my cousin Kally having dinner, and this lady walks up to me and
says, "There's a telephone call, it's your husband and he says it's an
emergency."  Now, as far as I knew, Kosta was working at Joyland.  So I
got up and I walked back to the telephone in the office.

When I got on the phone there was no answer.  I kept saying, "Hello,
hello."  Then I heard a moan.  It sounded like my father.  I said to
the lady, "It sounds like my father."  She said, "No, it's not your
father, it's your husband."  Then I heard another moan, louder, and I
knew it was Dad.  So I took off.  I went running through the festival,
but not running past the food line, because my mother was there and I
didn't want to panic her, I didn't want Mom having a heart attack
because something had happened to Dad.  I went and got Dina and I said,
"Something's wrong, let's go."

"I put in a quick call to Kosta at Joyland and said, "Meet me at the
house."  Then Dina and I just took off running.

When we got to the house Dad was lying on the floor in between the
family room and the kitchen area.  He said, "I'm hot."  We called an
ambulance.  Dad was sweating.  I got down on my knees and held him and
kept fanning him.  My heart was racing.  I just went into a speech, "I
love you, Dad, hang on, we're here, don't worry, you're going to be all
right."  And the whole time all Dad said was, I love you too, my
Lisa.

The ambulance came.  When Kosta got there I told him, "Go get Mom,
bring her to Halifax Hospital."

"They rushed Dad to the hospital.  In no time the whole waiting room
was filled with first cousins and second cousins and friends.

There were probably thirty-five people in the hospital waiting room
because everybody was at the Greek Festival.

"Then the doctor walked in and said, "I'm sorry, Mrs.  aspalakis."

"That was the most dramatic moment of my life.  There was screaming and
yelling and crying and wailing, it was awful.

"Then the doctor took me aside and he said he thought it was an
aneurism that killed my father, but he wasn't sure, it could have been
a heart attack or something else.

It looked strange and he wanted to do an autopsy, to enhance medical
knowledge or something.  He said somethIng wasn't quite right and he
couldn't understand why they had lost him.  I didn't really ask him
much, because I was anxious to get back to the family.  I just said,
"No, you can't do an autopsy because it is against our religion and :
didn't make any difference what Dad died of."  I mean at the time there
was certainly no reason to suspect foul play."

A few days later, Dina recalls being told by the undertaker that
Augustine Paspalakis had not died of an aneurysm.  "He said that they
didn't find any blood when they drained the body fluids and that with
an aneurysm there would be blood in the fluid."

The significance of the phone call that Lisa received at the Greek
Festival is difficult to assess.  As she sees it, if it was Kosta on
the phone, he did have time to leave the house and get back to Joyland
in time for her call to him.

"The woman who answered the phone had to leave the office, go through
the festival, and find me first," she says.

While it seems a bit far-fetched to imagine Kosta making the phone
call, then putting the phone next to Steno and lashing out the door,
especially when there is no clear native for all of this, there is
another detail about the call that is intriguing.  The person who made
the call that asked for Lisa Fotopoulos.

"The woman who answered the phone seemed certain that it was my
husband, though he didn't identify himself," Lisa says.  "The strange
thing is that I can't imagine my dad calling and saying, "Could I speak
to Lisa Fotopoulos, please?"  Dad would say, "This is Steno, I want my
daughter."  Whoever answers the phone in the church office is somebody
who knows us well."

Though later events would show that Kosta was certainly capable of
acting in bizarre ways, the scenarios that put Kosta in the house and
on the phone when Steno collapsed are all speculative.  It's just as
likely that he was at Joyland the whole time and that the woman who
answered the phone just made an incorrect assumption.

However, it is fact, not speculation, that Kosta had in the house a
small bottle of mercury, which he had bought from a dentist when he and
Lisa had gone to Greece.  By this time Kosta had become a full-fledged
gun aficionado and he told Lisa that mercury would make bullets go
faster.

It is also fact, not speculation, that Steno's death was consistent
with mercury poisoning.

Dr. Keith Wilson, author of Cause of Death (Writer's Digest Books),
says that a small amount of mercury added to a person's food could,
within thirty minutes, bring on symptoms such as those that Steno had:
abdominal pain, shortness of breath, staggering, and confused
thinking.

Mercury poisoning, he says, could also lead to death within hours.

"There would be no way to detect mercury poisoning without a blood test
or an autopsy," Wilson says, "and death by mercury poisoning could
certainly appear to be caused by an aneurysm."

And it is fact, not speculation, that months later Kosta bragged to
some of his unsavory friends that he had murdered Steno Paspalakis, his
father-in-law.

I put in a deck of cards," Kosta said to Lisa as they were leaving the
cemetery.

"Huh?"

"In the casket," he said.  "I put in a deck of cards.  You know.

Because of how we used to always play cards, me and Dad."

"Oh, Kosta."  She took his arm.  Through it all he hadn't shown any
emotion, but now she knew Kosta was hurting, too.  Kosta had loved
Steno, and if he hadn't been able to cry about it, then this gesture
with the playing cards was his way of showing his love and his grief.

After Steno was buried the family began to put its life back in
order.

Lisa, along with Dina and Kosta, went back to work at Joyland and the
gift shops.  Mary, still deeply in mourning, sought the company of old
friends, looking forward to lunchtimes and the evenings when she could
cook for her family.  It had been decided that Lisa and Kosta would
stay with her and Dina in the house on Halifax, at least until they
built a house of their own.

But healing would take a long time.  Lisa's worst moment came several
days after the funeral.

"When my father died I decided I was going to be strong," Lisa says.

"I was going to pick out the coffin and it was going to be the best.  I
was going to make the arrangements.  I was going to take care of my
dad.  And I did.  I did everything that had to be done and I held up.

But a few nights after the funeral I was in my bedroom with Kosta, and
I just lost it.  I totally fell apart.  I was hysterical.  I
screamed.

I cried.  I was out of control.  My whole body was heaving with
grief.

I went from the bed to the sofa to the floor.  I lay on the floor
wailing like a baby.  And my husband, Kosta, stayed with me through
every moment of that.  He held me.  He comforted me.  He told me
everything would be okay.  Never was a man more kind and loving than
Kosta was that night.  I don't know how I would have gotten through it
without him."

Kosta's sensitivity that night, and the feelings he had revealed by
placing the deck of cards in Steno's coffin, went a long way toward
making Lisa more hopeful about her marriage.

By November of 1987, when Steno died, the blush had left the rose.

The marriage was not in crisis, but neither was it blissful.

After two years of cohabitation, the inevitable personality differences
had emerged.  Kosta, who had been an enthusiastic partygoer when he was
engaged, now balked at going out to socialize.  Still dedicated to the
family, he attended all family-related parties, weddings, and
graduations.  But if Lisa's friends and she had many wanted the couple
to come over, have a few drinks, play some games, Kosta usually
declined.

When he did attend a party, Kosta, who never drank, usually pooped out
early.  At most gatherings Kosta was horizontal by ten o'clock.

Sacked out on the host's couch, he slept like the proverbial man with a
clear conscience.

He slept through gossip.  He slept through laughter.  He slept through
arguments.  In fact, Kosta became so notorious for his naps that when
friends gathered to celebrate his birthday they gave him a big napping
pillow as a gag present.

At other gatherings Kosta headed for the door early, leaving Lisa to
fend for herself.  While this habit annoyed Lisa, it was hardly grounds
for divorce.  Her marriage, as she saw it, was good, but not the
romantic perfection she had hoped for.  In other words, it was a
typical marriage.

Kosta and Lisa went to movies.  And occasionally they went out to
dinner, though even that had its fractious moments.

"My idea of going out for dinner," Lisa says, "is you sit down, maybe
have a drink, then you get an appetizer, smoke a cigarette, relax, talk
for a while, then order dinner.

Kosta thought of eating out as something you did because you were
hungry.  So we would get to the restaurant.  I would order an appetizer
and Kosta would make a face.

"An appetizer,' he would say.  "Well, sure,' I'd say.  "Let's just
order,' Kosta would say, "I came here to eat."  At home Lisa and Kosta
watched TV together, mostly rented videos that they would play on the
VCR.  Kosta loved adventure movies, which was an interest that Lisa
shared with him.

"But Kosta had terrible taste in movies," says his friend Peter
Kouracos, who often watched films with Kosta and Lisa, and then stayed
up late talking with Lisa long after Kosta had nodded off.  "If you let
Kosta pick out a film you'd end up with some awful Kung Fu movie."

They watched comedies and police stories, but their favorites were the
big adventure films.  Lisa loved the Sylvester Stallone and Arnold
Schwarzenegger flicks where everything got blown to hell and half the
cast got scorched to oblivion.  All that high-tech carnage was a
vicarious ihrill for a woman who couldn't stand to have a decimal Point
out of place.  Often she wished she were the kind of Person who could
leave her office looking as if Sly and mold had just been through on a
search-and-destroy TIlsslon.

Lisa was thankful that at least she didn't have shortstops and
quarterbacks as rivals.  Kosta was not much of a sports fan, though he
did like football and would now and then watch a few quarters of a
Buccaneers or Dolphins game with Dina on a Sunday afternoon.

By the beginning of 1987 Kosta had become less affectionate, less
attentive.  Gone were the kisses on the beach, the rush to pull out her
chair for her.  Gone was the jealousy of cousins who used to say, "Gee,
you two are kissing all the time."  The fire had cooled, and for that
Lisa accepted half the blame.  I could be a little more attentive,
myself, she thought.

What energy Lisa withdrew from the marriage, she deposited in political
action.  It had become clear that the city's plan to "redevelop" the
boardwalk was a poorly veiled threat to boardwalk businesspeople.  The
city was saying, "clean it up or we'll tear it down."  And it was also
obvious to boardwalk businesspeople that if they didn't get involved in
the redevelopment they would get shafted by the city.  So the Boardwalk
Property Owners' Association had been formed, with Frank Goon as
president, and Lisa as secretary and treasurer.

The secretary's job occupied much of Lisa's spare time, of which there
was little to begin with.  Hours that could have been spent curled up
in front of the television with her husband, she spent going to
meetings, sitting on committees, discussing redevelopment plans, and
just generally lobbying for the interests of the boardwalk
businesspeople.

She became a well-known figure about town and there was talk of her
maybe running for the city commission.

So by the time Steno died, Lisa had become "Miss Boardwalk," a
protector of what Steno had left behind.  Kosta, during this same time,
had become "Rambo."  And therein lay the acres of difference between
them.

"Rambo" is what Lisa called Kosta, not to his face, but in her mind.

"Rambo" was an affectionate way of looking at Kosta, a code word for
what Lisa had learned to think of as the little boy in Kosta, the
macho, adventurous, naive, but nonetheless harmless, part of Kosta.

Though Rambo got on her nerves sometimes, he was, on the whole,
dorable.

Kosta was Rambo because he was infatuated with men's idventure, with
survival techniques, with camping in the woods.  He loved to read
adventure comic books and surivalist magazines like Soldier of Fortune
as well as gun magazines like Guns and Ammo.  Kosta's idea of quiet
time alone was decimating targets with a .44 Magnum pistol at the
,trickland Shooting Range on Williamson Boulevard, west of Daytona, or
shooting his Uzi submachine gun in the woods on the other side of the
highway.

Though Lisa shared Kosta's love of adventure movies, that was as close
as she was likely to come to being Mrs. Rambo.  For one thing, Lisa
had no use for the great outdoors.

"Kosta would ask me to go camping with him.  "What, are you, kidding,'
I'd say.  "If there's no place for me to plug in a hair dryer I'm not
interested."  "Come on, you'll love it,' he'd say.  "Kosta, I'm afraid
of bugs, I'm afraid of bats, and I'm afraid of dogs.  And you want me
to go out where there's bears?  Forget it."  Kosta didn't press it, so
I never knew if he really wanted me to go camping with him, or if he
just knew I'd turn him down.  He used to go out of town on gun shows,
and I went with him to a few of those.  But when he went camping or
hunting I let him go alone.  I didn't want to do those things but I
couldn't ask him not to go just because I didn't want to.  That
wouldn't be right."

If Lisa wasn't going to march into the woods behind Kosta, she was at
least going to make sure that he came back from them alive.  Kosta, who
always acted as if he were bulletproof, often wore a camouflage outfit
to go camping.  Lisa explained to him that he was nuts, but Kosta would
always wave her off, "Ah, nobody is going to shoot me."

When Lisa found out there was a law requiring a hunter to wear a red
vest, she bought the redest one she could find and presented it to her
husband without a smile on her face.

"Wear this," she said.

When he left for subsequent hunting trips Kosta would slip into his
vest, all the time grumbling like a little boy who was being forced to
wear a hat and mittens to school.

e complained about what worriers women were, but he wore the vest, at
least until he was out of Lisa's sight.

Kosta's greatest passion was guns, something Lisa never understood.

When she'd met him, he had owned one pistol, but after two years of
marriage (and the acquisition of several credit cards) it seemed that
Kosta owned enough lethal weapons to start an insurrection.

Lisa had less interest in firearms than she did in sports, and when
Kosta would start talking about Magnums and dumdums and impact velocity
her eyes would glaze over.

Lisa could never keep an accurate count of just how many guns Kosta
owned, because he was always buying, selling, trading, and borrowing
guns.  All she knew was that guns seemed to be everywhere.

Kosta had a gun in the car.  Kosta had a gun in the office.  Kosta had
guns under the bed.

"One time he was driving along," Lisa says, "and he had a gun on his
lap, with his finger playing with the trigger.  I said, "Kosta, you
want to have guns, okay, have guns.  But not like that."  The gun was
on his lap in his right hand and he was driving with his left hand.  I
said, "Do you realize what could happen?  What if you hit a car and the
gun went off and shot the other driver.  How would you explain in court
that you were carrying a gun on your lap?"  But Kosta just laughed.  He
acted like he was always in control, like he was invincible.  A bullet
wouldn't go through him, that's for sure; it would probably go around
him it would be so scared.  That's the impression you got.

I think he did some of these things just to make me mad.

He wouldn't argue with me.  He'd just sit there.  And he would never
say "I'm sorry."  I never heard him say, I'm sorry."

These oddities occurred within the context of a normal marriage, in
which there was, says Lisa, "a lot of love."

Kosta was a well-dressed, articulate man with a master's degree.

He was still a man who brought flowers occasionally, who remembered
small things, who took Lisa jet-skiing and for romantic walks on the
beach.  In his own way, he was thoughtful.

Lisa was a devout Rolling Stones fan, and once at a party somebody
mentioned that the Stones were coming to Miami, but that all the
tickets had been sold.  Lisa was disappointed in a way that only a
Stones fan who's been denied tickets can be.  Mick Jagger's going to be
here, and I'm not going to see him?  Kosta, on his own, learned that
the Stones also were playing Jacksonville on their tour.  He came home,
smiling devilishly, his hands behind his back.

"I've got something for you, sweetheart."  He presented Lisa with a
ticket for the Stones concert in Jacksonville.

Lisa was quite touched, though it did seem odd that Kosta had bought
just one ticket.  "Aren't you going?"  she asked.

"Naw, I don't like the Rolling Stones," Kosta said, as if it were the
most common thing on earth for an attractive young woman to drive a
hundred miles to go to a rock concert alone at night.

By the middle of 1987 Kosta was wearing a gun more often than most men
wear a necktie.  "For protection," he explained.  Most people accepted
easily the fact that Kosta packed a pistol.  After all, he carried cash
bank deposits in that briefcase.

When Florida passed a gun law that made having a concealed weapon
illegal but an unconcealed one just fine, Kosta took to wearing a gun
in a belt holster.

Lisa went through the roof.

"It's legal," he calmly explained.

Lisa, less calmly, explained that she was running a business and that
customers could get a sudden desire to take their quarters elsewhere if
they saw some guy walking around Joyland with a gun strapped to his
waist like Billy the Kid.

The notorious Florida gun law was soon rewritten anyhow, and Kosta went
back to carrying his concealed gun in a shoulder holster under a sports
jacket.

"He liked to let his sport jacket slip back so that people could see
that he was carrying a gun," Dina says.

Though Lisa didn't care for guns, the fact that Kosta loved them was
not a big deal.  Certainly she didn't want one strapped to his hip or
sitting on his lap while he drove, but except for those incidents she
could live with firearms.

Like many women, Lisa suspected that the only difference between men
and boys was the price of their toys.  Guns were Kosta's toys, and as
long as he didn't own any illegally, as he assured her was the case,
Lisa saw guns as a minor annoyance, not a major problem.

"My father hated the guns, though," she says.  "He used to say to
Kosta, "What do you need a gun for,' and Kosta would say, "For
protection."  "Protection from what?"  "What if someone jumped me,'
Kosta would say.  "You yell at them, they'll go away, Dad would tell
him.

It always worked for Dad.  He was on the boardwalk all those years and
he had never needed a gun for anything."

Kosta, reminding Lisa about his lover's lane incident with the
Mexicans, convinced her she should have a gun.

He took her to the shooting range on Strickland a few times, then he
gave her a pistol.

"He told me I needed a gun to protect myself and he told me guns don't
kill people, people kill people and all that.  So I talked to other
people who owned guns, people I respected, and I thought, okay, maybe
Kosta's right.

What if something were to happen in my office or in my car?  So he gave
me this thirty-eight and it had a safety on it and he says, "Here let
me show you how it works."  And he's explaining, "Here's how the safety
works, when this thing is red you can shoot it, and first you pull this
little whatchamacallit."  So I said, "Kosta, I don't want a gun where I
have to remember all this.  It's too complicated.  If somebody tries to
rob me he's not going to stand there and wait while I try to remember
how to get this thing to work.

Don't they make a gun anymore where you just shoot it?"  And he says,
"Okay, I can get you a revolver."  So he got me two revolvers.

One I kept in the office and one in the car."

While Lisa worried that she might be robbed, Kosta worried that he
would not be robbed.  When Lisa asked Kosta if he was afraid to carry
money to the bank every day he said, "I'm not worried.  I would love
somebody to attack me," and he patted the gun that sat in the shoulder
holster under his sports jacket.  Kosta often made similar comments
about the house.  "I wish somebody would break in so I could shoot
him," he said.  Dina recalls another time, when Lisa was talking about
the city's concern that the boardwalk was becoming a haven for
lowlifes.  Kosta said, "I know how to clean up the boardwalk.  You take
a few of those bums out in the woods and shoot them."

These comments were typical of Kosta and nobody took them seriously.

Certainly not Lisa and Dina.  Kosta had a dry sense of humor.  He could
make any number of absurd comments with a straight face.  One local
Daytona Beach bank teller recalls telling Kosta that she had just
gotten a counterfeit hundred dollar bill.  Kosta asked to see what it
looked like.  She handed it to him.  He held it up for a moment, then
smiled.  "It must be one of mine," he joked, and they both had a good
laugh over that.

Kosta's flirtations with danger sometimes hit close to home.  One
afternoon Lisa found a hand grenade on her dresser.  She upbraided
Kosta about it.  "Kosta, are you Crazy.  A child could wander up here
and play with this thing."  But Kosta assured Lisa that it was not a
live grenade, he knew about explosives, and there was nothing to worry
about.  In fact, he had several hand grenades.

Lisa preferred not to have an arsenal under her own roof, so she was
not troubled when she learned that Kosta was burying guns in the
woods.

Though it seemed an odd thing for him to do, she was relieved.  Every
weapon that Kosta buried in the woods was one less weapon in the
basement, or under the bed, one less gun that could fall into the hands
of a visiting child.

"I knew he was going into the woods and burying guns.

I didn't know what else he was burying.  You know how a little boy has
a tree house and goes and sits there for hours on end?  That's how I
saw Kosta and his woods.  He read comic books, he liked to be
secretive.  I just figured it was part of his antics.  It was
boyishness.  He was just playing."

This business of burying things in the woods was a survivalist game
with Kosta.  He buried weapons one day, then came back another day to
see if he could find them before an imagined enemy could get him.

If Kosta had been alone in all of this advanced Boy Scout activity,
perhaps it would have seemed more bizarre to his friends and
relatives.

But he was not.  His cohort in the woods was Peter Kouracos.

Lisa had known Peter Kouracos almost all of her life.

Peter, thirty-four, was a member at St. Demetrios.  Kouracos was not
the type of person you would expect to find crawling on his haunches
through the woods with an assault rifle cradled in his arms.

A bachelor, and sometimes a law student, Peter had been vice president
of the Daytona Beach Young Republicans and had sat on several city
boards, including the Daytona Beach Drug Related Nuisances Abatement
Board.  A Jaycee, Kouracos had been active in many political campaigns
and had served as local administrator for Congressman Lou Frey.  For
many he was the model of the clean-cut, enthusiastic young public
servant.

Peter was strongly attached to Kosta, and to Lisa.  There were times
when Peter would say, "Kosta, I'm stealing your wife," and he would
take Lisa out for an evening.

Today he says that he and Lisa were "like brother and sister."

For Lisa, that's putting too fine a point on it, but she does recall a
good many late-night bull sessions with Peter.

If Peter Kouracos's connection to Lisa was less strong than he
remembers it, his attachment to Kosta was perhaps stronger than he
would now care to acknowledge.

"Peter used to call up all the time," Dina says, "and he'd ask for
Kosta.  I'd tell him Kosta isn't here.  "Well where is he?"  Peter
would say.  "I don't know, Peter."  "Well, where was he last time you
did know?"  "Peter, I don't know where he is,' I'd tell him.  It got
annoying sometimes."

Today Kouracos, who describes himself as "a survivalist," and "a
populist, despite being a conservative Republican," says there was a
good deal that Kosta kept from him.  He says, for example, that he went
with Kosta to bury things at least three times.  But he has no idea of
what those things were.

It was Kouracos that Lisa went to when the guns started to get to
her.

"I asked Peter, I said, "All these guns you and Kosta trade, that's all
legal, right?  I mean you're not doing anything that's going to get my
husband thrown in jail."  "Don't worry, Lisa,' he said, "don't worry, I
have a federal firearms license to buy and sell guns.

Everything is legal."" While Lisa might have worried that Kosta's love
affair with weapons was going to bring the police to her door, there
were only two occasions when he really did have contact with the law.

They were both minor, and only one involved a gun.

One occurred on a trip to Chicago.

"This was early in our relationship," Lisa says.  "I had never even
seen a gun, except on police officers.  We drove from Florida to
Chicago, and Kosta had a gun in the car, which seemed reasonable.  I
mean you're driving all alone that distance, something could happen.

In Chicago we went to a restaurant and they had valet parking, so after
dinner the guy got in our car.  He was going to be deputized or
something the following Monday.  Anyhow, I don't know if he searched
the car or just saw the gun or what, but soon after we left the
restaurant we were chased by a police car, with the siren and the
lights flashing and everything.  They ordered us out of the car and
made us put our hands up.  We were a well-dressed young couple driving
a Porsche with Florida license plates, so I guess that meant drug
smugglers to them.  I was scared out of my mind.  I almost lost it.  I
mean here they are handcuffing my poor husband and arresting him.  He
was charged with having a concealed weapon.  Kosta had to go back six
months later for the trial.  It was his first offense, so they gave him
probation."

The other incident occurred one night when Lisa, Kosta, and Peter
Kouracos went to the Daytona Jai Alai arena.

"The three of us went to Jai Alai.  We all went up to make bets.

Peter and I went back to our seats.  We were sitting there through the
whole game and Kosta didn't come back.  Where could he be?  After the
game we walked out to look for him.  He's coming toward us from the
parking lot.  "Where did you go?"  I said.  "I had a counterfeit
hundred-dollar bill,' he said, "and I had to give it to the police."  I
said, "Where did you get that?"  "Probably from the store,' he said.

That's not unusual, in a place like Joyland you're bound to get some
phonys.  So that was the end of it.  Kosta had to give up his
hundred-dollar bill, but the cop told him he could deduct it from his
income tax."

Though all of the things Kosta did in the woods, and in the workshop,
which he had built in the basement, were legal, as far as Lisa knew,
some of the things he proposed to do were not.  One night, for example,
Kosta let it slip that he had a plan that would make them a million
dollars.

"A million dollars huh?"  Lisa teased.  "If you've got a plan that will
make us a million dollars, it's got to be illegal."

Kosta smiled.  He loved it when she was wrong and he was right.

"It's not illegal."

"Then what is it?"

"I can't tell you."

"You can't tell me.  You've got a plan that will make us a million
dollars but you can't tell me."

"I can't tell you right now," Kosta explained.  "I can't tell you until
you have a need to know."

"A need to know?  Like in the CIA?"  Lisa asked.

"Yes," Kosta said.

Lisa sighed.  Kosta was such a little boy.  She loved him for it, but
sometimes it was exasperating because he took himself so seriously.

A few weeks passed before Lisa heard the whole story.

As Kosta explained it, he knew a guy who was a big wheel in the
Nigerian government and this guy was receiving kickbacks in gold and
diamonds.

"So he needs to get the gold out of there," Kosta said.

"You can't just take ten million dollars in gold and ship it out, you
know.  The place is under military control.  My friend confided all
this to me and he wants me to smuggle the gold out for him."

Lisa tried not to howl with laughter.  She knew Kosta could take a
ribbing, but outright ridicule might hurt his feelings.  "You're going
to smuggle it out?"  Lisa said.

"Kosta, what do you know about smuggling?"

Kosta smiled slyly.  "More than you think," he said.

"More than you think.  I'm going to rent a sailboat in Europe and sail
it to Africa, I'll get the gold and sell it and come back to America.

I get ten percent.  That's a million bucks."

"Are you nuts?"  Lisa said.  There was always a part of her that was
afraid that Kosta really had gotten into something and would act out
one of these fantasies.  "When you get the gold in the sailboat they
are going to shoot you and dump you in the Pacific Ocean."

"Nigeria is on the Atlantic Ocean," Kosta said, as if that proved that
he was entirely right and Lisa was entirely wrong.

"Well, whichever ocean it's on, they'll dump you in it.

And if they don't, you better not come back to me.  I told you a long
time ago I won't have a husband who cheats on me and I won't have one
who does anything illegal."

"It's not illegal," Kosta said.

"Right," Lisa said.  "Well it's one thing to have you going into the
woods and possibly getting shot by a hunter, but if you think I'm going
to sit and have you go to Nigeria while I hope and pray that you get
back in one piece you're crazy."

Lisa and Kosta had many conversations like this and they were, for the
most part, good-natured.  Kosta would explain some scheme, Lisa would
tell him he was nuts, then she would worry that her husband was serious
this time.  Kosta would smile, as if he had secret knowledge that Lisa
would never understand, and that would be the end of it.

Lisa would end up shouting sometimes, but Kosta was always unruffled.

Though Kosta never did go to Nigeria, there was one mysterious European
trip that Lisa did allow him.

One night in June of 1987, five months before Steno's death, Kosta told
Lisa that he was going to Italy in two days.

"What are you talking about, you're going to Italy?"  Lisa said.

"You just walk in and announce you're going to Italy.

Why are you going to Italy?"

"My grandfather's money," Kosta said.  "He's got four hundred thousand
dollars in a Swiss bank.  And he's going to let me have it so I can
start my own business."

Lisa was skeptical.  Kosta explained that under Greek law citizens were
only allowed to carry out a small amount of money.  "Doesn't matter how
long you're going away for.

You could come to America for a year, and they would still only let you
take about two hundred and fifty dollars," he said.

"So?"

"So everybody in Greece sneaks money out of the country.  They put it
in foreign banks.  Swiss, mostly."

"And your grandfather has done that?"

"Yes," Kosta said.

"Four hundred thousand dollars?"

"Yes."

"And he's going to give it to you?"

"Yes.  He's an old man, he doesn't need that money."

Lisa was uncertain.  The part about people sneaking money out of the
country was believable.  She had heard that before.  But she had been
to Greece and had met Kosta's people.  Most of them were potato
farmers.  They owned many potato fields, and they would sell the
potatoes at various markets around Athens.  It seemed unlikely to Lisa
that someone could squirrel away four hundred thousand dollars from
selling potatoes.  On the other hand, she had been to their home, a
handsome two-storied house in Tripoli outside of Athens, and though it
was modest by American standards, she had to admit it was quite fancy
for Greece.  Still.  Four hundred thousand dollars.

"Kosta, for God's sake," she said, "your people are potato farmers.

They don't have that kind of money."

Kosta smiled.  "Yes, they do."  Then he patted her face, took her by
the hand and led her to the couch, where he explained carefully.

"Lisa, you know how people walk by a business, maybe on the boardwalk,
and they think this guy is making maybe a hundred dollars a day, but
because we know the business we can see that he might be making five
thousand.  Well, it's the same thing.  Potato farmers in Greece make a
lot of money when they own a lot of fields, like my grandfather does.

If you're not in the business you wouldn't know that.  Also, he has
bought and sold land and made money at that."

Kosta's logic seemed reasonable.  After all, Lisa thought, what do I
know about potato farming?  Maybe there is big money in it.

Lisa still doubted Kosta's story, not because it wasn't plausible, but
because she was sure Kosta was really sneaking off someplace to cheat
on her.  He wasn't going to Europe at all, he was going someplace to be
with a woman.

So she hounded him, kept asking questions, thinking she would trip him
up.

"Where are you going exactly?"

"Zurich."

"Well, why are you going to Italy first?"

"I've got to meet my sister Merca there and your cousin Sotirios, we'll
drive up from Italy."

Kosta told Lisa that he had to meet his sister Merca, who lived in
Greece, because there were two keys to the safeIdeposit box containing
the grandfather's money.  He had one key, Merca had the other.  The
story sounded a little dramatic, but not impossible.  And the idea of
Merca being with Kosta was comforting.  Certainly Kosta wouldn't be
cheating on Lisa if his sister were around.

However, the presence of Lisa's cousin Sotirios was not so
reassuring.

Lisa didn't know why her husband was meeting her cousin in Italy, but
she knew that her cousin was not a good influence on her husband.  Her
cousin Sotirios, to her mind, was a bum.  He was supposed to be
attending school but seemed always to be traveling all over the
world.

There was something a bit shady about him.  He had money with no
apparent source.  Once Lisa had heard her cousin tell another male
relative, "If you want to cheat on your wife, make sure you wear a
rubber," and she knew this was not the sort of man she wanted to be
paling around with her husband.  When Sotirios had come to Florida to
visit, it seemed that he and Kosta spent all their time gambling.  They
had gone to Jai Alai every day in Daytona Beach, and when the Daytona
fronton was closed they drove to Jai Alai in Melbourne on Florida's
famous Space Coast.  Lisa's cousin was the kind of guy who could play
poker from morning to night, and he wasn't shy about asking Kosta to
join him.  Sotirios was, she had often said, a man without scruples.

Still, the more Lisa thought about it, the more absurd it seemed, to
think that Kosta would go all the way to Europe and meet with his
sister and Lisa's cousin just so he could screw around with another
woman.  Furthermore, he would have to come home with four hundred
thousand dollars.

She realized she was just being paranoid.  So when the day came, she
drove Kosta to the airport in Orlando, kissed him good-bye, said,
"You'd better come home with money," and then drove home so she could
start worrying.

Lisa did not tell her friends what was up.  She told everybody that
Kosta had gone to Chicago for a graduation.  She would wait to see this
miraculous four hundred thousand bucks before she started crowing about
it.

Kosta, who was only gone for three days, called every day.  He put
Merca on the phone, so Lisa knew that her sister-in-law really was with
him.

While Kosta was gone, Lisa and Dina went to a lawyer.

Lisa was fairly certain that you couldn't just dump four hundred
thousand dollars into a suitcase and send it through airport baggage.

Kosta would need to convert the money into a bank check or money order
or something.

The lawyer told her what needed to be done, and she dutifully passed on
the information to Kosta when he called.

When Kosta came back from Europe he was, apparently, empty-handed.

"It didn't work out," he explained tersely.

"They said my grandfather was supposed to be there, too."

Kosta seemed reluctant to donate more details, so Lisa let the matter
drop.  Because of the phone calls she was fairly sure that Kosta had
not been shacking up with another female, and that's what really
mattered.  Still, she thought, that's the last time he goes off without
me.

Funny Money The details concerning Kosta Fotopoulos' s involvement with
counterfeit currency are not as accessible as those concerning his
other crimes.  Dealing in counterfeit money is a federal offense and it
comes under the purview of the Secret Service, an organization not
known for its loquacity.

However, documents on file at the federal court in Orlando, Florida,
along with the statements of witnesses, provide a fairly vivid picture
of the counterfeit money operation, one aspect of Kosta's secret
life.

In June of 1987 when Kosta told Lisa that he was flying to Milan,
Italy, to meet his sister Merca and pull four hundred thousand dollars
of his grandfather's money out of a Swiss bank, Lisa need not have
worried that her husband was going to meet a girlfriend.  Kosta did go
to Milan.  There he purchased a thousand counterfeit U.S.
hundred-dollar bills, for twenty cents on the dollar.  The seller,
allegedly, was none other than Sotirios, Lisa's cousin.  Where Kosta
got the twenty thousand dollars to pay for the funny money can only be
imagined.

According to the Secret Service, Kosta actually had some counterfeit
bills before he went to Milan.  This was money asking Kosta to join
him.  Sotirios was, she had often said, a man without scruples.

Still, the more Lisa thought about it, the more absurd it seemed, to
think that Kosta would go all the way to Europe and meet with his
sister and Lisa's cousin just so he could screw around with another
woman.  Furthermore, he would have to come home with four hundred
thousand dollars.

She realized she was just being paranoid.  So when the day came, she
drove Kosta to the airport in Orlando, kissed him good-bye, said,
"You'd better come home with money," and then drove home so she could
start worrying.

Lisa did not tell her friends what was up.  She told everybody that
Kosta had gone to Chicago for a graduation.  She would wait to see this
miraculous four hundred thousand bucks before she started crowing about
it.

Kosta, who was only gone for three days, called every day.  He put
Merca on the phone, so Lisa knew that her sister-in-law really was with
him.

While Kosta was gone, Lisa and Dina went to a lawyer.

Lisa was fairly certain that you couldn't just dump four hundred
thousand dollars into a suitcase and send it through airport baggage.

Kosta would need to convert the money into a bank check or money order
or something.

The lawyer told her what needed to be done, and she dutifully passed on
the information to Kosta when he called.

When Kosta came back from Europe he was, apparently, empty-handed.

"It didn't work out," he explained tersely.

"They said my grandfather was supposed to be there, too."

Kosta seemed reluctant to donate more details, so Lisa let the matter
drop.  Because of the phone calls she was fairly sure that Kosta had
not been shacking up with another female, and that's what really
mattered.  Still, she thought, that's the last time he goes off without
me.

Funny Money The details concerning Kosta Fotopoulos's involvement with
counterfeit currency are not as accessible as those concerning his
other crimes.  Dealing in counterfeit money is a federal offense and it
comes under the purview of the Secret Service, an organization not
known for its loquacity.

However, documents on file at the federal court in Orlando, Florida,
along with the statements of witnesses, provide a fairly vivid picture
of the counterfeit money operation, one aspect of Kosta's secret
life.

In June of 1987 when Kosta told Lisa that he was flying to Milan,
Italy, to meet his sister Merca and pull four hundred thousand dollars
of his grandfather's money out of a Swiss bank, Lisa need not have
worried that her husband was going to meet a girlfriend.  Kosta did go
to Milan.  There he purchased a thousand counterfeit U.S.
hundred-dollar bills, for twenty cents on the dollar.  The seller,
allegedly, was none other than Sotirios, Lisa's cousin.  Where Kosta
got the twenty thousand dollars to pay for the funny money can only be
imagined.

According to the Secret Service, Kosta actually had some counterfeit
bills before he went to Milan.  This was money he had gotten from
Lisa's cousin Sotirios.  Perhaps it was a sample, of sorts, so that
Kosta could experiment with passing it.  On April 23, when he passed a
fake bill at Chess King, a men's clothing store in North Daytona Beach,
the bill was discovered but Kosta was not detained.

Presumably, during this time he was passing a lot of other bills that
were not detected.

Kosta's friend Peter Kouracos also saw Kosta with counterfeit bills
before the Milan trip.

"Kosta and Sotirios came to me all excited about the counterfeit the
cousin had brought from Europe," Kouracos says.  Kouracos describes
Sotirios as "the serpent who first came into the garden and tempted
Kosta to eat the apple."

"But what could I do?"  Kouracos says.  "Call the police and tell them
my friend is passing counterfeit money?"

When Kosta got back from Milan in June and explained to his wife that
he was empty-handed, he had in fact acquired the hundred thousand
dollars in counterfeit money, which he would eventually bury in the
woods off John Anderson Drive.

The role of Peter Kouracos in all of this is difficult to discuss.

The federal jury that heard charges against Kouracos acquitted him.

Kouracos does, however, admit to a rather strange scenario in which he
went along while Kosta buried things in the woods at night and Kouracos
never asked Kosta what he was burying.

As Kouracos tells the story he drove Kosta three times to a deserted
area along John Anderson Drive on the west side of Daytona Beach.  On
one occasion Kosta had a big vinyl bag.  On the others, a metal
cannister.

"We would drive along in the dark and at some point Kosta would tell me
to stop.  He didn't seem to be watching for any marker or counting
telephone poles or anything like that.  Kosta would get out of the car
and tell me to come back in a half hour or forty-five minutes.

I would drive around for a while, and when I came back he would be
there waiting for me on the road."

While Kouracos's story does not go down easily, it is no less credible
than a good many other stories that would be told after the world
learned that Kosta Fotopoulos was a murderous sociopath.

Less mysterious than Kouracos's role in the counterfeiting scam is the
role played by Vasilios and Barbara Markantonakis, a couple that worked
for Lisa at Joyland.

Vasilios, who is known as "Bill," and Barbara Markantonakis, were hired
by Steno to work at Joyland in 1987.

Steno met the two at a restaurant where Kosta once worked, but Lisa and
Dina aren't sure who knew who first.

In any case, Steno liked to help out fellow countrymen who were down on
their luck, so Barbara was put to work giving out prizes and making
change in the back of the arcade.

Bill, who did free-lance house renovations when he could, started out
doing carpentry and painting at Joyland, and when there was no such
work left, he was given an apron and a job making change.

"Barbara was one of the best workers I ever had," Lisa says, "but Bill
drove me nuts sometimes.  He'd come down and tell me exactly how he was
going to fix something.  I'm going to take off all this paint and I'm
going to put down a thin layer of this, and then I'm going to put down
tar and I'm going to take off this and put on that.  And he would go on
and on, telling me every detail of what he was going to do.

But he wouldn't always do it.  He was not the most reliable guy."

Bill was eventually relieved of his apron, but he still hung around
Joyland, where he did odd jobs.  He also spent a lot of time going to
gun shows with Kosta.  Bill, who was in his fifties and the father of a
small boy, thought Kosta was the greatest guy in the world.

He used to call him the Golden Child.

"Kosta and Bill went to a lot of gun shows," Lisa says.

"Tampa, Miami, Fort Lauderdale.  They would buy and sell and trade guns
at these shows.  He and Bill would usually stay overnight.  When I
asked Kosta why he was going to so many gun shows he would say, "I'm
doing it for Bill.

The guns are Bill's.  He needs the money, but he doesn't know a lot
about guns."" Lisa asked many times if everything was on the up and up,
and was assured just as often that everything was legal with the
guns.

However, she had her doubts when Bill Markantonakis came to her one day
and said, "Don't you worry, Lisa, I have a floorboard," and he told her
about a secret compartment under the floor of his car, where he could
carry twenty or thirty guns.

She went to Kosta.

"Kosta, I thought you told me everything was legal with these guns you
trade."

"It is," Kosta said.

"It is?  Well then how come this guy has a floorboard?"

"Oh, Lisa," Kosta said.

""Oh, Lisa?"  Never mind "oh, Lisa."  If everything you're doing is
legal, then why do you have to hide guns under the floor?"

"Honey," Kosta said.  He patted her cheek.  "Think about it.

You've gone to gun shows with me, you know what I do there.  But this
guy, Bill, he's trying to make a few extra bucks, you know, selling
guns.  It's not against the law, but if you were a police officer and
you stopped someone for traffic ticket and you saw thirty guns, what
would you think?"

Kosta's explanation, as usual, made sense.  Lisa pushed the incident
from her mind, and had no further reason to Suspect Bill, and certainly
not Barbara, of being a criminal.

But Kosta knew otherwise.  In the autumn of 1987 Kosta Sent Bill and
Barbara to Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, all over the South to pass
the funny money in convenience Stores, race tracks, supermarkets, and
restaurants.  According to the Secret Service, Bill and Barbara were
allowed to keep half the profits on the money they passed.

The Secret Service also says that Peter Kouracos was brought into the
scheme and was paid a thousand dollars to help pass the counterfeit
bills.

During this time Kosta hid his counterfeit money, or at least part of
it, in a military ammunition can at the North Peninsula State
Recreation area in North Daytona Beach.

Whether he buried this on one of his nocturnal trips with Kouracos, or
by himself, is open to speculation.

On March 18, 1988, the counterfeit scheme began to unravel when Barbara
Markantonakis was caught passing a fake hundred-dollar bill at the
Gateway Supermarket in Gray, Georgia.  Bill and Barbara were picked
up.

Bill, who speaks little English, took a lie detector test, and the
couple was released, pending indictment.  Bill and Barbara went back to
Daytona Beach.

Kosta was not at ease with the idea of Bill and Barbara going to
trial.

He decided to do something about it.

According to the feds, Kosta and Peter Kouracos took Bill for a ride
one night in January, 1989.

As Michael Pritchard, a special agent with the Secret Service's
Jacksonville office, tells it, both Peter Kouracos and Kosta were
armed.  This is not surprising.  Kosta and Peter were the kind of guys
who strap on a gun to go buy a loaf of bread at the Winn-Dixie.  They
took Bill for a drive out near the Volusia Mall.  They asked him about
his lie detector test and his conversations with the Secret Service.

Bill swore that he had told the feds nothing about Kosta.

"We know everything that went on during the polygraph test," Kosta told
Bill.  "The Greek interpreter was a friend of ours."

"Nothing," Bill said.  "I told them nothing about you."

"Do you know what would happen if you had squealed?"

Kosta asked him.

"Nothing," Bill said.  "I said nothing about you."

"You would be dead," Kosta said.

According to the Secret Service, once Kosta and Peter were convinced
that Bill had kept his mouth shut, they hook hands with him and told
him that he was an okay guy.

Bill and Barbara were indicted in the Middle District court of Georgia,
and on January 25, 1989, they were trusted by the Secret Service.  They
went before a magistrate and were released on bond.

Bill called Kosta and told him that he was worried because too many
people knew about Kosta's connection with counterfeit.  (Though Kosta's
involvement with counterfeit was still unknown to the police and his
friends and family, by this time he had begun to acquire a good many
lowly acquaintances and many of them knew what he was up to.) Bill
assured Kosta that he would not talk, but said he was worried that
others would, and wanted to know what he should do.

Kosta, according to the Secret Service, gave Bill a hundred bucks and
told him to buy a suitcase.  "This is never going to court," he said.

"You're taking a trip."

"To where?"  Bill asked.

"Home," Kosta said.  "Greece."

Kosta told Bill to pack, bring his wife and son, Angelone, and meet
Kosta that night in the parking lot of the Circus gift Shop, a business
owned by Lisa on AlA.  "I'll give you five thousand dollars," he told
Bill.  "You'll fly to Greece."

Bill and the family pulled up in their van that night.

Kosta was waiting in the empty parking lot.  Kosta carried a two-way
radio with him, and he checked with his cohort on the other end to make
sure that the Markantonakises had not been followed and that the Secret
Service had not set a trap.  The voice on the other end told him that
everything was okay.  The voice, according to Bill, was that of Peter
Kouracos.  Bill says that when Kouracos called Kosta back to see if
everything was okay, Kosta said, "Everything is okay, Pete."

Once Kosta felt safe, he gave Bill an envelope containing $4,800 and
told him to drive to New York and fly out of JFK.

Once you get to Greece there will be more money," Kosta said.  He told
Bill the money would be channeled through Mercina.

"Oh, one other thing," Kosta said.

"What is that?"

"If you do not stay in Greece your son will be killed.

And your wife's parents, they might have an accident."

The Markantonakises understandably were afraid that they might not even
make it to New York.  Bill certainly knew Kosta to be a dangerous
man.

In fact, Bill says that Kosta once offered him money to murder Mary
Paspalakis, an offer that Bill turned down.  After the meeting at the
Circus parking lot, Bill, Barbara, and Angelone went to Barbara's
parents' house.  According to the couple, when they got to the house
they saw a car, which they believed to be Peter Kouracos's.  They knew
they were being followed.

Barbara's father agreed to drive the family to New York the next day.

Around the time they were crossing the Florida-Georgia line, they saw,
a car with Kosta and another person passed them.  Kosta beeped his horn
several times, then exited in front of them.  Kosta, apparently, had
followed them out of town to make sure they were obeying his orders.

In Greece there were at least three transactions that the Secret
Service knows of, in which Kosta got money to the Markantonakises
through his sister.  But when the money stopped coming, Bill and
Barbara were reduced to poverty.

During this period Dina Paspalakis received a call from Bill in Greece,
which seemed absurd at the time.

"Bill is not a guy you can depend on for the truth," Dina says.

"He called up and said that Kosta was planning to kill me and my sister
and my mother.  It was such a ridiculous thing to say.  I was at
Joyland and I told Lisa and Kosta and we all had a good laugh about
that."

Bill and Barbara yearned to return to America.  They drummed up enough
money for air fare, probably from relatives, and they flew from Athens
to Montreal.  From Canada they came across the border into Syracuse,
New York, and there they moved in with Barbara's sister.

Bill called Kosta from Syracuse.  He told Kosta that he and Barbara
were back in the country.  Kosta was not pleased, but he sent Bill some
fake ID and a phony Social Security card in the name of James Stanley
Dill.  He told Bill that more documents would be coming so that Bill
could take on a new identity.  He also sent five hundred bucks.

On September 12, 1989, Secret Service agents caught up with Bill and
Barbara and arrested them.  In time this arrest would lead the feds to
Kosta and he would be charged with dealing in counterfeit money.

But by that time, a charge of counterfeiting would be the least of his
problems.

Top Atlantic Avenue, a section of route AlA that runs the length of
Daytona Beach, is the easternmost thoroughfare in the city.  If you are
a tourist coming into town by air, bus, train, or highway, you will
drive through the more urban sections of Daytona Beach, past the
shopping malls and auto repair shops and Kentucky Fried Chicken
franchises, across the Halifax River, and continue to Atlantic Avenue,
because that's probably where your hotel room is.

When you reach Atlantic you've reached the beach.

Atlantic is like the main drag of any heavily populated beach resort in
the south: an infinity of hotels and motels, all of them done up in
cupcake colors, mostly pink or mint or white.  They have names like
Tropical Seas and Tropical Winds, Ocean Breeze and Ocean View, Surf
this, Palm that, Coral something, and Sandy whatever.

As you drive up Atlantic toward Ormond Beach, or down Atlantic toward
Daytona Beach Shores, the signs flash by: Color Cable TV, Heated Pool,
Efficiencies Available, Unique Family Resort, Jacuzzis, Family
Restaurant, Large Balconies, Bikers Welcome, Vacancy.  Restaurants,
lounges, and gift shops fill in the gaps between hotels, and here and
there you'll find a little mall with a supermarket or hardware store,
proof that the area does have permanent residents who eat in and
sometimes need nails.

One thing Atlantic Avenue and Daytona Beach did not have until recently
was a convention center.  In the early eighties the city of Daytona
Beach, feeling the need for such a facility, seized a parcel of land on
Atlantic Avenue across the street from the north end of the
boardwalk.

A meeting and exhibition complex called Ocean Center was built there.

To go along with Ocean Center the city wanted a fine new hotel that was
suitable for conventions.  Daytona Beach hotels were, for the most
part, old and small.  The city wanted something big and classy, the
kind of place that could charge $140 a night and still draw a crowd.

Daytona Beach laws allowed the city to grab land under eminent domain
and turn it over to private developers, such as mall builders or hotel
chains, if the land was "blighted," a catchall term that, one might
imagine, could be deciphered to suit the needs of politicians and
developers.

The coquina area, which is the carnival booth section between Joyland
and the bandshell, was declared blighted.

It was torn down and in its place construction was begun on the
Marriott resort complex-seventeen stories, two pools, health club,
restaurants, meeting rooms, the works.

To Lisa and other boardwalk businessmen, the writing was on the wall.

As they saw it, the city had ruthless disregard for the fact that
people had put their lives into the boardwalk.  Big hotels meant
conventions.  Conventions meant money.  On the scale of things a
thousand Shriners counted for a lot more than a few second-generation
Greeks.  The coquina area had been an appetizer.  The boardwalk, if the
developers had their way, would be dinner.

"They've got it worked out very nicely," Lisa told Kosta one night in
the office.  "Let's say you're a hotel builder and you want to build a
hotel in a certain area and you Top Shots come to the city and you say,
I want to build a hotel, but I don't want to deal with every one of
those little people in their houses.  So the city says okay, we
understand, we are the city and we have the right of eminent domain and
under our redevelopment provisions this is a blighted area, it's a
public nuisance, so we'll get rid of it, then we'll turn it over to you
so you can build a hotel."

Things were perhaps not that simple, but they sometimes felt that way
to Lisa and the other businesspeople on the boardwalk.  By the time the
Marriott was up and running, it was clear that the city had its eye on
the rest of the boardwalk.  The police had cleaned up the area that now
was the Marriott, but many of the bums they had rushed had taken up
residence on the boardwalk.  Late at night there were teenagers dealing
drugs outside of Krystal's hamburgers, and by one A.M. finding a hooker
on the boardwalk was easier than finding a taxicab on Atlantic
Avenue.

Clearly, the city fathers were watching all this with an eye to the
future.  Like children waiting for Christmas they were counting the
days until the boardwalk decayed into something that could reasonably
be labeled "blight."  The boardwalk, after all, was oceanfront
property, and nothing fills a resort hotel faster than the sound of
waves out back.

The Boardwalk Property Owners' Association had been formed to prevent
that day from ever coming.  And that is why Lisa, in her role of
secretary, had become a highly visible spokeswoman for the campaign to
save the boardwalk.  After long hours in Joyland she drove to city
meetings, or to meetings with developers.  She raised her voice.

She circulated petitions throughout the area, where there was a good
deal of sentimental attachment to the boardwalk among people who had
gone there as children.  Her picture often appeared in the newspaper.

"My father was the last person to buy boardwalk property, in 1969," she
told the papers.  "And he didn't buy it as an investment.

He bought Joyland because he saw a vision of something he could pass on
to his children.  Joyland was his life.  And there are many others just
like him.

These boardwalk businesses represent people's lives.  Some family
businesses have been here for fifty years.  You can't just come in and
cut them down like a bunch of trees."

The Property Owners' Association decided it could win over its
detractors not with the vinegar of resistance, but with the honey of
cooperation.  They made more of an effort to keep riffraff out of their
establishments.  They got the police to redouble their efforts at
night.  Before long the area got too hot for the dope dealers.  The
hookers headed across the river to Ridgewood Avenue.  The bums found
shelters away from the beach.  The boardwalk was again relatively free
of lowlifes.  Blight, it seemed, had been cut off at the pass.

Still, with powerful forces like Hyatt, Omni, Marriott, and Sheraton
all salivating for the boardwalk property, Lisa and the others knew
they would have to come up with something more.  They devised a plan
whereby a hotel would be built behind the boardwalk.  Since the new
hotel would tower over the one-storied arcades and snack bars it would
still be an oceanfront hotel.  Furthermore the association would hire
an architect and redevelop the boardwalk with an overall theme that was
consistent with the architecture and theme of whatever hotel was built
there.

By winter of 1989 it looked as though the flies had been caught with
honey, and that the danger to the boardwalk had passed.  Lisa got
excited just thinking about the boardwalk's revitalization, its return
to old glories.  The new plan, if it passed, would be good for
everybody's business.

There would be no further erosion in the number of families and small
children who ate hot dogs and played games on the boardwalk.

And then something happened to threaten the recovery.

A man wanted to open a business that could give the boardwalk one more
nudge toward "blight" and extinction.

And what's worse, the man was Lisa's husband.

Top Shots At the south end of the boardwalk there had been a Sound Trax
recording studio, where visitors to Daytona Beach could swivel their
hips and sing like Elvis or shout out their impression of Whitney
Houston, and cut a record of their own.  In early 1989 the studio moved
out and the location became available for rent.  Kosta decided that he
wanted to open a pool hall with a bar at that location.

"A pool hall?"  Lisa said when he told her.  She couldn't believe it.

Kosta had about as much investment sense as a loan officer at a Texas
savings and loan, and would probably get eaten for lunch in any
business.  But a pool hall.  It was the single worst idea she could
imagine.  She was, after all, Miss Save-the-Boardwalk, and a pool hall
with a bar, no less pretty much symbolized everything that had put the
boardwalk in jeopardy.

This pool hall, which he wanted to call Top Shots, would be Kosta's
second venture into business.  In October of 1988 he and Dominick, a
machine mechanic at Joyland, had formed ABC Vending Company, to place
video games in bars and restaurants around Daytona Beach.  (Kosta had
gone first to Dina with that idea, but Dina, with similar plans for his
own future, chose not to go into business with Kosta.) One of the
locations where Kosta placed video games was a pub in south Daytona
owned by a man named Vincent Speziale.

Kosta and Vinnie, a tall, manly Italian with dark wavy hair and a lot
of jewelry, became quite friendly.  Kosta would come by every week to
split up the money from the machines, and he stopped in almost every
day for lunch, sometimes bringing Lisa with him.  The Speziales and the
Fotopouloses became friends.  Though it was clear to Vinnie right from
the beginning that Kosta was a bullshit artist, he found Kosta kind of
likeable, and Kosta's tales, which were always toned down when Lisa was
around, were entertaining.

"He said he was a commando assassin and he had been trained by the army
in Greece," Speziale says.  "He was constantly carrying a weapon and he
wanted people to see it.  He would purposely cock his jacket back so
people could see it."

Kosta, who neither smoked nor drank, would stay at Vinnie's place
shooting the breeze until all hours of the night.  ABC Vending failed
after a few months, but when Kosta got this idea about a pool hall he
approached Speziale, who agreed to go in on it with him as a one-third
partner, along with Dominick.

Lisa was torn.  She knew how badly Kosta wanted a business of his own,
how it diminished his pride to have a wife earning most of the money.

"Greek men are not macho, but they are chauvinistic," says Father
Nick.

And Lisa did want Kosta to find a business that was right for him.

She knew that pool had become the favorite trendy sport of yuppies
lately, but they were interested in real full-size pool tables in
classy surroundings.  What Kosta proposed was really a cramped little
bar that would have four or five small coin-operated pool tables.  It
would attract all the wrong people.  It was unthinkable.

It was almost as if Kosta had gone out and said, "Let me see, what kind
of business would really piss Lisa off?"

Long before it was a reality, Top Shots became for Kosta and Lisa a
presence in the marriage, more powerful than any pregnant
ex-girlfriend.

Lisa insisted he not open the business.  "You can start another
business," she said.  "You can open a pool hall over on Ridgewood, near
where you used to live, that's where all the bums are anyway."

But Kosta dug in his heels.  "You just don't understand," he told
her.

"I know what I'm doing.  You'll see."

The tension between Lisa and Kosta about the pool hall came to a head
one night when Lisa and Kosta were having dinner at the Speziale house
in South Daytona with Vinnie and his wife, Elena.

Over eggplant parmigiana and red wine (none for Kosta) Kosta went on at
great length about his love of pool halls Top Shots and his plans for
the business.  It would be the kind of place where friends could meet,
shoot a little pool, talk about sports, have a beer.  And with him
around most of the time-he patted the pistol-nobody would get out of
line.  He would let no bums, no dope pushers, no whores hang around.

The boardwalk would be just like Lisa wanted.  Respectable.

"And I'll be nearby for Lisa, if she needs me," he explained.

"I've tried to convince Kosta that pool halls attract the worst kind of
people.  Lowlifes," Lisa said after dinner.  She knew she was swimming
against the tide.  After all, Vinnie was a partner in the pool hall.

"I mean I know there are family pool halls, with tangerine felt on the
tables and all that.  But they're in bowling alleys in the suburbs, not
bars."

She waited for some agreement, but none was forthcoming.  "It's not
right," she said lamely.  She didn't know what to do with her hands.

It was one of those moments when she desperately wanted a cigarette,
but didn't need to deal with Kosta's disapproval on top of everything
else.

"This is for families," Kosta insisted.  "People on vacation with their
kids."

"Is that why you've got a liquor license?"  Lisa said.  She was trying
to remain cool, but this thing was really bugging her.  It was such a
slap in the face, after all her work for the Association.  "Is that
what the bar is for, the kids?"

"You serve beer and wine," Kosta said in his own defense.

"Yes.  I also serve hot dogs and hamburgers and French fries.  You
can't compare the two."

"Don't worry, don't worry."

"Well, I am worried."  Ah, the hell with it, she thought.

She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocketbook and lit one.

"This," she said, "is not a good investment.  It will attract the wrong
element."

"Says who?  You?"

"Yes, me.  I've been working for four years to make the boardwalk a
place we can be proud of again.  Now there's a pool hall coming in so
the bums will have a place to hang out.  And who's bringing it?  My own
husband."

The Top Shots issue led to a big fight that night at the Speziales,
though Lisa and Kosta had such different styles of arguing that it is
deceptive to say they fought.  When it came to strong disagreements
Lisa was fire and Kosta was ice.  Lisa would raise her voice, wave her
arms.  Her heart would race, her hands would shake, and she would try
most of all to be heard, to communicate.  Kosta, on the other hand,
would fight not with words, but with the silences between the words.

He would be at first stubborn, paternalistic, righteous.

He made it clear that he knew better than anybody else.  He was
smarter, braver, more clever.  Facts were beside the point.  Opinions
he didn't agree with were held by idiots.  Regulations, rules, and even
laws were made for others, not for him.  And if none of this led to
persuasion he would not raise his voice or stamp his feet.  He would
simply clam up.  And when it was over, he would never, ever say "I'm
sorry."

Kosta certainly was not to be swayed on this pool hall thing.  He
needed about eighteen thousand dollars to get Top Shots going.  He put
up six thousand dollars, and so did Vinnie and Dominick.  Long before
the first rack of billiard balls was ever broken, the partnership was
troubled.

"They were supposed to remodel it and do this and that to it," Vinnie
Speziale says.  "And they were supposed to open up May the first.  Then
they half did everything.  They tried to do stuff without getting
licenses.  Kosta, not Dominick.  Dominick would try to do it, and Kosta
would say, "I'll take over all this deal."  And he was going to do this
without getting a license and he knew this person, trying to
circumnavigate the whole system, which wound up getting fines and all
this kind of stuff."

Once Lisa saw that the opening of Top Shots on the boardwalk was a
certainty on the horizon she made the best of it.  If she couldn't talk
Kosta out of this lunatic idea, she would at least encourage him to
create the classy operation that he said he wanted.

She suggested colors, floor plans, music.  She gave him as much
accounting advice as he would accept, and urged him to acquire the
proper licenses, fill out the proper forms, send in the proper fees.

Even if Lisa didn't care for Kosta's plan, it was nice to see him
happy.  He would have his own place.  He could strut around, be a big
shot, the way he'd always wanted.

To celebrate this truce the couple went to Montreal for a short
vacation.  It was May of 1989, but Top Shots was not yet ready to be
opened.  In Montreal Lisa and Kosta visited the Basilica of Queen Mary
of the World, Mount Royal, and the Chateau de Ramezay.  They rode in a
carriage, they ate in fine restaurants.  More and more the irritant of
Top Shots was receding from Lisa's mind.  When they got back to Daytona
something happened to push the pool hall even further from her
thoughts.

She found out she was pregnant.

"I was ecstatic," she says.  "We were both so happy.

Kosta would be a daddy, everything would be great.  He was excited.  I
was excited.  I loved Kosta more than ever.

We both wanted to have this baby."

Though the prospect of having a child filled Lisa with joy, the joy was
not untainted.  Kosta was hard to read.  He hugged her often during the
first weeks of the pregnancy, and told her how happy he was about the
baby.  But she was never certain that he felt the happiness.

So often, when it came to feelings, Kosta seemed like an actor who was
only reading his lines.  He never showed emotion in a way that was
convincing.  Once, when Kosta's father was ill in Greece, Lisa and her
family had called Athens every day.

How's he doing?  Does he need anything?  Our prayers are with you.

But Kosta never called to see how his dad was.

Kosta, aren't you worried about your father?  Naw, he'll be okay, if
anything happens they'll call me.

To Lisa, this detachment seemed all the more strange in a Greek man.

Her father had been able to gush emotion without inhibition.  Her
brother could cry easily.  Her male cousins and the uncles could all
express love and fear and anger and sadness.  But not Kosta.  Kosta was
a machine.

With a baby on the way, these thoughts were particularly unwelcome, so
Lisa pushed them from her mind, as she always had.

Kosta's just a very calm, stable person, she thought, the strong silent
type, like Clint Eastwood.  She reminded herself of those mournful
moments when Kosta had so nobly comforted her.  If he couldn't show
emotion, at least he understood it in others, she thought.  When she
wasn't at Joyland she busied herself with baby magazines and plans for
a nursery.

Opening day for Top Shots was to be June 25, 1989, and Lisa dreaded
it.

As hard as she tried, it was difficult to imagine young well-dressed
yuppie businessmen driving over to Top Shots to talk about the baseball
scores after a day in the office on the other side of the Halifax
River.  It was equally hard to see mom and dad from Charleston bringing
the kids into Top Shots to shoot pool while the parents threw back a
few brews at the bar.  No matter how many times she envisioned the Top
Shots picture in her mind it always faded into a scene where thugs,
hustlers, hookers, and scam artists hung out, swilling beer out of the
bottle and eyeing the tourists for an easy mark.  Because of this, and
because she was pregnant and didn't feel well, Lisa delayed her first
look inside the pool hall.

But Dina and his cousin went to Top Shots the first night, and what
they found was Lisa's nightmare.

"We went there to play a game of pool," Dina says.  "It was a bad
crowd, a bunch of drifters and bums.  I felt very uncomfortable.  We
left, went over to McDonald's.  I kept saying to my cousin, I can't
believe what was there, and he kept teasing me about all the bums.

When I told Lisa, she pitched a fit over it.  And I couldn't sleep that
night, it bothered me so much.  The next day I went to the Owners'
Association and I complained about the pool hall.  Actually, I guess it
was more of an apology than a complaint.  After all, it was owned by my
own brother-in-law."

When Lisa did take a stroll over to Top Shots, on June 29, a Thursday,
what she saw was not much different from what she had imagined.  The
customers crowded into the small, boxy pool hall, were not all felons,
of course.  There were vacationers stopping in for a beer, nicely
dressed college kids shooting pool, even people she knew, like Peter
Kouracos.  She sat at the bar for a while talking to Peter and keeping
one eye on the clientele.  A couple of roughlooking kids with tattoos
came in, and when they said "fuck this" and "screw that" nobody rushed
to tell them they couldn't talk that way in here.  Later there was a
girl named Dixie whose skirt was not only short, but it was also purple
and leather.  She asked Lisa if she'd seen a guy name Stanley-she
didn't know his last name-who was supposed to meet her here.

What was worse, Kosta, the big shot businessman preening and
schmoozing, seemed to like his customers, and they liked him.  In
thirty-five years of working on the boardwalk, Lisa's father had never
gotten to know any of the boardwalk people, except business owners.

But four days after opening the pool hall, it seemed Kosta knew every
hooker, every crack addict, and every loser who blew into town.

The next day Lisa started to miscarry.

"I had gone down to see the place.  I went home and started to
miscarry," she says.  "I had to stay in bed for a week.  And Kosta was
never there.  He was at Top Shots all day and all night long.  Here I
was going to have his first baby.  I wanted this baby.  And no Kosta.

Dina was around and calling me all the time, and Mom of course was
always with me.  But I wanted my husband.  I told him, "You don't
care."  I said, "I know there's nothing you could do, but at least you
could come here and hold my hand."  I called him up at Top Shots.

"It's twelve o'clock at night,' I said.  "Can't you come home?"

He said, "I need to stay here and take care of the business."  "I might
lose our baby,' I said.  I was scared.

"Then I lost the baby.

"Kosta's attitude was, "Well, we'll have another."  He was upset about
it, but not to the point where you'd think it really affected him."

After the miscarriage, Kosta spent almost all of his time at Top Shots,
or so it seemed to Lisa.  He would go to Joyland in the morning.

Lisa would arrive at ten-thirty.

Kosta would leave to make the bank deposit and that, usually, was all
she saw of him until after midnight.

While it seemed to Lisa that Kosta was spending too much time at Top
Shots, it seemed to Vinnie that Kosta was not around enough.

Speziale recalls, "After we opened the business and I saw the way that
things were going, I wasn't very happy with Kosta's selection of people
that he had in there.  I wasn't very happy with this and that, his
bookkeeping methods, his not keeping receipts, and always, you know,
saying, I need more money, I need more money.  I said, "Hey, you know,
this thing's getting a little bit old for me."  I have to leave and
close my business and then go down to that business and close it
down."

By the end of July, Kosta's friend Angelo had bought out Vinnie's and
Dominick's interest in Top Shots for the same six thousand dollars each
they had invested.  Vinnie later was reinstated as partner, in return
for managing the place when Kosta was not around.

When Lisa recovered from the miscarriage she went back to work at
Joyland.  Often during the day she would walk down to Top Shots to see
how Kosta was doing.  Kosta tried to appease her.  He promised her he
would keep a closer eye on things.  He even threw out a couple of
troublemakers and told them if they came back they would be killed.

Such threats were typical of Kosta.  Honest people never took them
seriously.  (Though by this time there were Top Shots regulars who knew
that Kosta was a dangerous man.) Despite all that had happened, Lisa
was very much in love with her husband.  Sometimes she would go to the
bar and tug on his arm, asking him to take a break for a walk on the
beach with her.  They would walk to the end of the boardwalk and down
the ramp that led cars onto the beach.

To the shore they would go, where the sand was softer and cars were not
allowed.  Lisa would walk barefoot, holding her sandals in her hand.

Kosta would point to the hotels, talk about how he might like to buy
one someday.

The love of the ocean was something they had always shared, and as they
walked along the edge of it, Kosta would take her hand.  Would he do
that if he didn't love me, she wondered.  Would he come home to me
every night if he didn't love me?  It was a question that had always
been there, but lately it rose more often to the surface of her
thoughts.  Does Kosta really love me?  She was never quite sure.  On
the beach she and Kosta would talk about the baby they would someday
have, never the one they had lost, and the house of their own in Ormond
Beach, which Lisa's uncle began building for them in July.

These were hopeful moments for Lisa, and with Kosta's arm around her,
she told herself that Top Shots would not be such a problem after
all.

But the mood was often shattered when she and Kosta would head back,
and as they walked along the boardwalk, young women wearing too much
makeup would drive by and shout, "Hi, Kosta, how ya doing, Kosta?"

During this period Lisa was partly guilty of Kosta's great sin: she
didn't show what she was feeling.  In the summer of 1986, when she and
Kosta had visited Greece, she had lost her beloved grandmother.

Then in November of 1987, her father had died.  And now it was 1989 and
she had lost her baby.  Though Lisa was quick to scream and shout in an
argument and could get almost hysterical in situations like the arrest
in Chicago, she was also the type to hold in her deepest, most painful
feelings.  The sadness she was feeling in the summer and autumn of 1989
was something that she shared only with her younger brother Dina, her
closest confidant.  Dina was something beyond a brother and a friend.

He was like her second self.  But no one else really knew that Lisa was
hurting.  Certainly she had bawled and bawled when she lost her baby,
but when she got back to work at Joyland that was the end of the
sobbing.  She stood straight, she worked hard.  She was, for all the
world to see, a woman in control of her life.

As bad as things were, they were about to get worse.

On October 18, Lisa was driving along Seabreeze Boulevard when she
noticed that a pickup truck behind her seemed to be out of control.

She swerved off the road and avoided being hit by the truck.  The truck
screeched to a halt and ended up on the side of the road in front of
her.

"I remember the boy driving the truck looked real shook up and I
thought I ought to get out of my car and see how he is," she says.

"After I started driving I thought again maybe I ought to turn around
and see how he is.  But there were lots of other cars around, so I
figured he'd be okay.

At this time I had a brake light that was broken on my car and I'd been
asking Kosta to fix it.  That was unusual, for me to have to nag him
about it, because usually Kosta was good about changing my oil and
doing things on the car.

Anything that was a man's job he would take care of."

Lisa didn't know that it is an old private detective's trick to break
one rear light on the back of a target's car because it's so much
easier to follow a car at night when it's the only one with a single
rear light.

On the afternoon of October 25 Lisa was in another auto accident.

"I was sitting at a light," she says.  "It took forever to change.

When it finally did change, I just went.  I didn't look both ways.

I just went.  This guy in a pickup truck ran into me.  He was towing a
sailboat and he had another guy with him.  I stopped the car to get out
and look at the damage.  There wasn't much.  But I thought, Gee, this
is weird, two incidents with pickup trucks in seven days.  The guy from
the pickup truck was a young guy, kind of hefty, but not fat.  He said,
"Come here let's talk about it."  He motioned me to get on the main
street.

I got in my car and made a U-turn to get it out of the road, and when I
got out of my car again the guy was gone.  I thought that was awfully
strange.  I went to the boardwalk and told a couple of the cops I knew
there.  I was shaking and crying.  They told me to calm down and go to
Joyland.

I told Kosta what had happened and he held me in his arms and told me
everything was okay."

The two accidents were frightening, so Kosta and Lisa turned it into a
running gag.  They had seen a movie in which all the villains were in
Volkswagens.  Now the joke became that all pickup trucks were out to
get Lisa.  "Lookout, Lisa, it's a pickup truck," Kosta said when they
went out to eat later that afternoon.  Lisa made a face and ducked, and
the two of them had a good laugh.

The laughter stopped, however, that night at about seven o'clock when
Lisa Fotopoulos got the phone call that every wife dreads.

Kosta Fotopoulos knows for sure when he decided to kill his wife.

Maybe it was the day he met Lisa and realized that she was the heir to
about three million dollars in assets.  Maybe it was the day he
concluded incorrectly that her death would bring him half of seven
hundred thousand dollars in insurance money.  Maybe it was much
later.

In any case, before the summer of 1989 it appears that Kosta had
achieved a delicate balance between his sociopathic willingness to
murder his wife, on the one hand, and the fact that he didn't
particularly need to kill her, on the other.  But in the summer of 1989
something came into his life to throw that balance out of whack.

Her name was Deidre Hunt.

Deidre Michelle Hunt, the twenty-year-old woman who would become Kosta
Fotopoulos' s primary agent for murder, was born in 1969 in South
Weymouth, Massachusetts, south of Boston.  Her mother, Carol Hunt, was
then twenty-two, and it might have been best if she hadn't had a
baby.

For one thing, Carol was not married to Deidre's father, a man who had
less interest in his daughter than he did in the art of Japanese finger
painting.  For another, Veidre Carol was a mental case, and she was
unable to get through even the first day at home without punishing her
baby for crying.

"Deidre wouldn't stop crying, so I slammed her down in the crib," Carol
says.  "She was only a few days old."

Carol Hunt prayed day and night for the strength to nurture her baby
with tenderness.  But strength did not come.  She brutalized the baby
often.

"I knew in the back of my mind that I always resented Deidre.  I would
say Deidre suffered a terribly rejected childhood.  That's an
understatement."

If Carol Hunt had deliberately tried to create a sociopath she could
not have done a better job than she did.  Certainly Levin's "profound
disruption" and "lack of bonding" are descriptions of Deidre's
infancy.

The guilt Carol felt over this abusiveness led her several times to the
brink of suicide.  There was at least one bona fide suicide attempt.

In particularly dark and desperate moments, Carol hatched bizarre plans
to do away with herself, her daughter, and her son, Carl, who was born
two years after Deidre.

Carol, who is now forty-three years old and stable, after decades of
therapy, says, "It seemed to me we'd be better off not in this
world."

Deidre must have felt the same way.  She reports that she was using
drugs and alcohol by the time she was in the second grade.

Deidre Hunt's father lived in nearby towns when Deidre was growing
up.

But, according to Deidre, who is also known as "Dee," he steadfastly
refused to spend time with his daughter.  In fact, by Deidre's own
reckoning, much of the chaos of her life has resulted from
inappropriate attempts to capture the father's love that she never
had.

"Not having my father love me was the worst thing I could imagine,"
Deidre says now.  "I became obsessed with getting my father's love."

As a kid, Deidre resented the men her mother dated.

"If I couldn't have my father's love, I wanted to choose the man who
would love me as his little girl," she says.  "I didn't want my mother
choosing that person for me."

As a small child Deidre wore braces on her feet to correct a leg
problem, and for many years after that she wore braces on her teeth.

She felt homely and unloved.  When the braces were removed she was
delighted, surprised, and confused to realize that suddenly boys wanted
to be with her.  Whether the boys really felt differently about a girl
without braces, or whether Deidre suddenly allowed herself to be
attractive is hard to say, but no doubt she learned that when it comes
to attracting men, being pretty is better than not being pretty.

Deidre was precocious and she was flirtatious.  When she was nine she
came home wearing a boy's ring.  Her mother made her take it off.

But boys were not the problem.  Men were.  Even at an early age Deidre
attracted the attention of grown men.  It was not the sort of attention
she craved.

When she was eleven she was raped by a neighbor.  But her mother never
reported it.  "I just couldn't deal with it," Carol Hunt says now.

When Deidre was twelve she was almost raped again, and she was stabbed
in the attempt.

But fearing that her mother would again do nothing, Deidre kept her
secret to herself.

"And when I was fourteen a guy who lived nearby left his wife and kids
because he was in love with me," Deidre says.  "I mean I hardly even
knew this guy.  He was obsessed with me and it came as a complete
surprise."

By the time she was a young woman Deidre was quite pretty.  She was the
kind of girl every boy gets a crush on, with big brown eyes and long
brown hair and a lithe young body that could dance up a frenzy.

But when she sent out her strong sexual signals she sent them in every
direction.

She was the kind of girl who could make a man feel like God one day and
shit the next.  Not just a pretty face, she was also bright, and quite
talented with a pencil and sketch pad.  She had a great facility for
working numbers in her head.  She was a reader, too, mostly of romance
and adventure novels.  She liked the outdoors, fishing, camping.  Her
dream: to open her own bar.

The obsession with her father's love did not dissipate as Deidre
grew.

Once, in the seventh grade, another girl told Deidre about her mother's
"wonderful new boyfriend."

The boyfriend turned out to be Deidre's father, and Deidre was
crushed.

"That," she says now, "is when I really just hated him."

Deidre says that once in a bar she tossed a beer can in her father's
face, and another time she got several of her friends to beat him up.

Deidre passed through this crucible for the most part without
professional help.  When she'd been in the second grade, Deidre, Carol,
and Carl went into family therapy, but when Deidre attacked her brother
while acting out her anger toward her father, the therapy was brought
to an end.  Over the years there were other attempts at therapy, but no
program that was long enough or successful enough to pull her off the
self-destructive path she was on.

"One psychiatrist told me I was a sociopath," she says.

"But that doesn't make sense to me.  I cry a lot.  I have feelings."

Not surprisingly, Deidre came in conflict with the law at an early
age.

When she was twelve she was arrested for breaking into a house with
another girl and several older boys.

By the time Deidre was in the ninth grade Carol had taken the children
and moved to Goffstown, New Hampshire, where Deidre, deeply depressed,
dropped out of school.

Soon Deidre was on her own.  She started hanging around the streets of
Boston.  She worked a short stint as a hooker, then she worked the
phones for a drug dealer.  She lived on the streets, camped out at
friends' houses.  Still just a kid, she was headed, it seemed, for an
early demise.

One brush with the law came when Deidre told the police that two men
with knives had kidnapped her and another girl, taken them to New York,
and sexually abused them.  Deidre flunked a lie detector test and
police concluded that she had gone willingly with her alleged
kidnappers.  For filing a false police report she was fined a hundred
bucks.

When Deidre's dope pusher boss got in trouble with the mob, Deidre
headed north, back to New Hampshire, and for a while it looked as if
she might emerge from the darkness into a somewhat sunnier existence.

She hooked up with a new boyfriend, Kenny Adams.  It was a unique
relationship, inasmuch as Kenny was the only fellow she'd ever had who
didn't beat her.  Carol Hunt started dating Kenny's father, and before
long the two couples set off for Florida to begin life fresh.  It was a
time, says Carol Hunt, "when everything was going to be roses."

But the roses were not to bloom.  Kenny's father and Carol couldn't say
no to booze and cocaine.  Deidre, who also had a problem with those,
got pregnant and had a miscarriage.  Then Kenny's father was killed in
a truck accident.  Carol retreated into a pit of depression.  Kenny
joined the air force.  And Deidre and Carol went back to New Hampshire,
this time to Manchester.

Deidre, already toughened by a life of disappointment, hardened.

Apparently filled with self-loathing, she sought out relationships with
men who would mistreat her.  By this time she was quite promiscuous.

She knew what to give men and they knew what to take.

"A lot of times I slept with a guy just to avoid the hassle of him
trying to talk me into it," she says.

She was preoccupied with her looks, her makeup, her clothes.

Hungry for a love that she could never seem to get, she became a sexual
adventurer, and she did not confine her sexual adventures to the
opposite sex.  Deidre became a bit of a cult figure for the other
street kids along Elm Street in Manchester's "combat zone."  The kids
would scream her name in the night when she cruised by with one of her
boyfriends.  "That," Deidre says now, "was fun."

Carol Hunt, living in a housing project where Deidre stayed with her
off and on, and dwelling in her own world of booze and despair, was
oblivious to the fact that Deidre was free-falling into a sordid life
of drugs, booze, bisexuality, and crime.

In 1987 Deidre became friends with Bridget Riccio, another street girl,
who was a year younger than she was.

It was, says Riccio, "a sick friendship."  Riccio remembers that Deidre
enjoyed playing with guns, that she made vague boasts about having
committed murders.  Riccio recalls Deidre Hunt saying to her, "After
the first shot it gets easier."

"Once when I was thinking of committing suicide," Riccio says, "Deidre
offered to shoot me."

Deidre and Riccio were part of a group of kids that Catherine Divine,
an assistant county attorney in New Hampshire, calls "amoral."

"That group," Divine says, "had no values, no idea at all about the
consequences of their actions."

On July 5, 1987, Deidre and Bridget Riccio walked up to Veronica
Rudzinski, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who was waiting in her car for
a friend in Manchester's Derryfield Park.  One of the girls shot
Rudzinski four times with a .25 caliber pistol.  (Deidre and Bridget
each claim the other pulled the trigger.) The victim did not die, and
Deidre did only six months in jail because she made a deal to testify
against her friend.  (Ironically, Bridget didn't do any time at all,
because Rudzinski did not identify her at the trial.) In jail Deidre
went through drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, and when she got
out in June of 1988, she proudly greeted her family wearing a pink
satin dress.

After that Deidre tried again to save her own life.  She did some
waitressing.  She enrolled in a school of cosmetology in Manchester.

But before long Deidre, who was easily dominated, had taken another
imperfect man into her life.

His name was Anthony Pfaff, and she met him on Elm Street on her
twentieth birthday, February 9, 1989.  Pfaff brought Deidre two cases
of beer and some marijuana to celebrate.  When she asked him where he
got the money he said that it came from a tax refund.  But the real
urce of the money, according to Manchester police, was far more
significant, at least in the light of later events.

The police say that Pfaff's money was part of a five thousand-dollar
payoff from a man named Kenneth Johnson, who allegedly hired Pfaff to
murder his wife.  Pfaff, Johnson, and another man have been charged
with the murder.  Specifically, police allege that Johnson's two hired
assassins killed Johnson's pregnant wife at a construction site while
Johnson watched and taunted his wife as she died.  Deidre is not
suspected of being involved in that murder.

The next brute in Deidre's life, after Pfaff, was a young man named
Larry Tarle.  It was a typical Deidre Hunt romance.  She loved him.  He
beat her.

Deidre got pregnant by Larry Tarle and, according to her, Tarle beat
her until she miscarried.  This, however, was no reason to stop loving
him, and when Tarle split for Daytona Beach in the summer of 1989,
Deidre went running after him.

In Daytona Beach Deidre took up with Tarle again.  But before long they
drifted into the old patterns, and Deidre broke off with him.  She left
him, she says, "with no hard feelings."

Soon Deidre was dating Newman Taylor, Jr known around the Daytona
boardwalk as "J.  R."  J. R a good-looking young man with a strong body
and big tattoos on his forearms, was a street kid like herself.  He had
come down from West Virginia "for spring break," he says, and "to
party," and had stayed.

"At first Deidre didn't like me," J. R. says, "because I beat up some
guy right in front of her.  But then we got to know each other and we
liked each other and before long I was fucking her."

J. R who fancies himself a ladies' man, didn't let his relationship
with Deidre stop him from seeing other ladies.

Nor did Deidre shy away from other men.  She got a job as a harmaid at
Top Shots.  It was there that she lobbied for tips in her bikini,
blatantly rattling her tip jar in the faces of customers who forgot
her.  It was there that her magnetic personality drew all sorts of
characters to the boardwalk establishment and Deidre became, in the
words of one Daytona Beach cop, "some strange type of role model,
sleazy but alluring."  And it was there that Vinnie Speziale, who hired
Deidre, introduced her to Kosta Fotopoulos.

The Kosta that Deidre Hunt met at Top Shots was quite a different
character from the sometimes daffy and adorable Rambo that Lisa
Fotopoulos slept with every night.

"I met Kosta around the end of July, beginning of August," Deidre
says.

"It wasn't a heavy relationship at first, we were just friends.

We went wave running and we went a few places and he bought me some
clothes, then we ended up sleeping together."

In a matter of weeks after her arrival in Florida Deidre learned more
about Kosta Fotopoulos than Lisa had learned in four years.

Deidre learned that Kosta was a pimp, a counterfeiter, a sadist, a car
thief, an arms smuggler, and a murderer.  Most of all, she learned that
Kosta, the funny guy who fell asleep on couches when he went to parties
with his wife, was an extremely dangerous person.  These, apparently,
were the qualities she looked for in a fellow, because she quickly fell
in love with him.  She was smitten with Kosta, and she was thrilled
when he told her he loved her also.  To her Kosta was a classy guy.  He
was handsome, he was a sharp dresser, and he drove a BMW.

Before long Kosta was in and J. R. was out.  But, typical of Deidre,
she and J. R.

remained friends.

In Deidre Hunt, Kosta had found a young woman who was beautiful, a good
lay, and, perhaps most important, one who thought that he was a big
wheel.  Around the boardwalk Kosta had cultivated the idea that he was
the one who had money and owned property, not his wife, and this
fabrication went down quite easily with Deidre, as it did with the
boardwalk bums.  They were people who believed in money.  If a guy wore
a nice suit and drove a fancy car, then he was somebody.  It was that
simple.

In Deidre, Kosta had found an adoring young woman who would listen to
his heroic tales, who would bat her beautiful brown eyes in admiration
and never express a doubt.  He showed her his guns and she cooed.  He
told her about an armored car robbery he was planning, and she
marveled.  He asked her if she might be interested in laundering
counterfeit money, and she said, "Sure."

It's not surprising that Kosta would fall for Deidre.  She was not just
pretty and sexual and naive.  She was also someone who didn't mind
getting whipped now and then.

She was someone with whom he could express a dark side of himself, a
side that Lisa and Dina and all of their friends, and all of the Greek
aunts and cousins and nephews, had never seen.  Deidre Hunt was someone
that Kosta could torture.

Kosta Fotopoulos had what Jack Levin, the criminologist at
Northeastern, would call "a sadistic need."  And, being a sociopath, he
lacked the inhibiting influence of conscience.  After the romance had
faded from their relationship, Deidre would tell the world that Kosta
had tortured her in a variety of ways.  He beat her, she said: he
burned cigarettes on her breasts, he shot knives at her feet, he put a
gun to her head, and he threatened to kill her and have her stuffed.

"This," she says, "is a very sick person."

If Kosta is the kettle, then Deidre is the pot calling him black.

Teja James, one of their boardwalk acquaintances, recalls, "Deidre
wanted me to kill six kittens that were in her yard.  She wanted me to
put them in a sack and shoot them.  She said they were getting all over
everything in the house."  James also reports that Deidre once wanted
to get a gun and stalk a man who had stolen a pair of sunglasses from
her, and another man who had insulted her on the boardwalk.

So this Kosta-Deidre thing was not a healthy relationship, but if
Deidre had any complaints about her new honey back in July and August,
she kept them to herself.

By all accounts she was in awe of Kosta.

"He used to tell me, "You have to know about all this survival stuff,'
"Deidre says.  "He said it was good to know about guns.  He took me
shooting a couple of times.  He shot an AK47 in front of my face one
day.  He shot it right out the window of the beamer with a silencer on
it one day, shot it into the trees.  Another time he took me shooting
at night out by the state park where he and Peter Kouracos used to go
shooting."

Kosta also told Deidre that he had been trained by an Israeli terrorist
group.

"Six months of training," he said.  "Severe training.  Once I had to
sit underground, under camouflage for four days without moving, me and
another assassin.  That's the kind of training we did."

He told Deidre he would teach her how to swallow her tongue to kill
herself if she were ever captured and tortured and couldn't take any
more pain.  Another time he lit a cigarette and placed it on his
forearm and left it there for five minutes while he talked to her.

"This is not hard," he explained.  "This is easy."

Kosta also told Deidre that he was connected to the CIA.

One day in the BMW Deidre noticed an envelope from the CIA.  It was
addressed to Kosta.  (Most likely the envelope from Washington
contained a form letter rejecting him for a job.  In June of 1988 Kosta
had applied for a job with the CIA, like thousands of other crackpots,
and had been rejected.) Deidre was impressed.  To her the CIA envelope
was just further proof that Kosta was quite a guy.

"Are you in the CIA?"  Deidre asked him.

"No," he said.  "But I do jobs for them."

"What kind of jobs?"

"Personnel elimination," he said.  "Contracts.  Hits."

He explained to Deidre that a CIA contact would call him on the
phone.

"I might not even know who is calling," he said.  "They'll ask me if I
want to do a job for a certain amount of money, but they won't tell me
anything about the job until I accept it.  They might say if it's hard
or easy.

[can usually tell from the price range, anyhow.  If I say no, it goes
no further."

"And what if you tell them yes?"  Deidre asked.

"Then they send me a package that tells me everything I need to know.

Once they send me a package I have to do it.  There's no backing
out."

Kosta also showed Deidre a number of checks, allegedly CIA payments for
assassinations, though it is hard to imagine the CIA issuing a payroll
check "to Kosta Fotopoulos for murdering John Doe."

Kosta also told Deidre that he treated his wife wonderfully.  He told
Deidre about the flowers, the presents.  "I am," he said, "the perfect
husband."

In August of 1989, Kosta set up Deidre in a room at the Cosa Del Mar
hotel for a week.  For the first few days at the hotel Deidre was
available for sex with both Kosta and a male friend of his.  However,
as Kosta became more possessive of Deidre, the friend was edged out.

Deidre's first assignment, according to her boardwalk acquaintances,
was to recruit teenage hookers, who Kosta could set up as "dates'' with
men at Top Shots.

After the Cosa Del Mar, Kosta put Deidre up in a house owned by a
friend of his on South AlA.  Then he moved her to an apartment on
Schulte Avenue, then to a house on Lenox.

The reason for the frequent moves was that no sooner would Deidre move
in than she would have a group of friends over for dope and sex
parties.  Kosta, who did not smoke, drink, or do drugs, did not like
having all these Deidre people around Deidre, and whenever he moved her
he warned her not to give out the address.

While Kosta said the drugs were okay, he told Deidre that having sex
with another man was not.  Soon it was well established among the
boardwalk lowlifes that if you got in bed with Deidre Hunt you risked
getting a bullet in the head.

J. R who continued to see Deidre and occasionally sleep with her after
they broke up, recalls one incident when Deidre was staying in the
apartment on Schulte Avenue in Daytona Beach Shores.

"Me and this guy named Rich was at Dee's.  My girlfriend, Gail, was in
the bedroom asleep.  We had been up all night partying.  Early in the
morning Kosta pulled up and we didn't have time to run out the side
door to the garage so we went and headed into the bedroom and hid in a
closet.

"Well I thought I locked the door but I didn't, and this time Kosta
wanted to search the house.  So he came into the bedroom and he opened
the closet door.  He whipped out a gun and stuck it to Rich's head and
he said, "Have you been fucking Dee?"  And Rich said no.  And Kosta
said, "What are you doing here then, boy?"  Rich said, "We was
partying."  When he said "we' Kosta seen me where I was ducked down
underneath these clothes, and he took a shot at me.  He missed, and the
bullet went into the floor, but I don't think he meant to miss.  Then
he put the gun to my throat and he said, "J.  R look, just tell me one
thing, are you fucking Dee?"  I said, "No, I've got a girlfriend in
there,' and he said, "Look, you can tell me the truth, you had her
before I did."  And I said, "No, I'm not fucking her, Kosta."  So he
let me up.  And I walked in and I said, "That's my girlfriend, Dee's
not my girlfriend."  I said we were just here partying, and he didn't
say no more.  But he wasn't kidding around.  If Kosta had thought I was
fucking Dee he would have killed me for sure."

The other girl who was in the apartment recalls Deidre's "action to the
incident.  Deidre, she says, was happy and xcited.  She was flattered
that Kosta would shoot somebody out of jealousy for her.

After Kosta had gone she said the others, "Oh, it's lucky for you that
I was here.  If I wasn't here he would have killed you all.  But I was
here and I would be a witness, so he didn't."

When Kosta was sure he could trust Deidre he told her that he had
killed eight people and he wanted to initiate her into the Hunters and
Killers Club.  The club was a roup of assassins and various operatives
who did what he called "political jobs."  To get in you had to murder
somebody and have it videotaped.  The videotape would be kept by
another member as blackmail to prevent you from flaming in any other
members of the H and K Club.  In turn, you would receive the videotape
of a murder being ommitted by the other member.

(No evidence has since surfaced to indicate that the H and K Club
existed anywhere outside of Kosta's imagination.  Perhaps he got the
idea from some of his guns that were made by Heckler and Kote and known
as H&K's.) If Deidre was at all skeptical about this H and K business,
she was probably persuaded when Kosta made her watch films of him
torturing another man who was tied to a chair.  Though this tape has
never been found, Deidre is probably telling the truth about it.

Torturing somebody and videotaping it is certainly consistent with what
we now know about Kosta Fotopoulos.  Also, there is at least one other
person who says he saw tapes and films that were to be kept secret.

Gus Moamis, who at twenty-four was one of the oldest of the boardwalk
habitues, recalls: "I walked into Dee's house one day.  When I walked
in the front door their[Kosta and Deidre] were watching this movie.

All I caught was a quick glance of somebody shoottig somebody and then
Kosta flipped the tape off real quick and he got all over me; shit
about me being there, what the hell was I doing in the house and why
didn't I knock and like that.  Kosta had a rule, where Dee was staying
you weren't allowed.  To be there you had to be there while Kosta
wasn't there.

"The next morning I was over there and Dee had a box, a little steel
box, it was pushed under the bed.  When I come into the room she had
the box opened because I had bought her-well, let's just say I had
bought her a toy and I was getting ready to go through the tapes and
she slammed the box real quick on me and locked it.  It had a lock on
it and she pushed it back under the bed.  The next time I seen that box
it went from her to Lori, [Lori Henderson, Deidre's friend and lover]
and then it went to Kosta.

I never seen it no more but I believe there were more tapes than just
that one."

No one but Kosta knows what happened to the man being tortured in
Kosta's film, or how many others met a similar fate.  J. R for one, has
a rather grim view of the possibilities.

"There were a lot of kids disappearing from that boardwalk," J. R.

says, "maybe one a week.  I think Kosta might have been taking them in
the woods and shooting them."

While J. R."s comment is an eerie echo of Kosta's joke to Dina about
cleaning up the boardwalk by "taking a few bums into the woods and
shooting them," there is no evidence that this was happening.

Certainly there were kids who would hang out on the boardwalk for a few
weeks and then disappear, but that is to be expected among such a
transient population.

While Kosta was violently jealous of any man who slept with Deidre, he
apparently was not threatened by having his friend Peter Kouracos go
out with her.  In fact, he encouraged it.

Kouracos took Deidre out twice.  He says he did not single her out or
have any special attraction to her.

"I didn't have anybody else to take out," he says, "and Kosta made it
clear that she was available."

The first time Peter took Deidre out it was primary night for the local
elections.  To Deidre, the street kid and high school dropout, this
must have seemed like pretty heady company.  Kouracos, after all, was a
good-looking guy, bright and articulate, whose large vocabulary made
conversations more interesting.  He was always well groomed and well
dressed, favoring three-piece suits.  Furthermore, Peter was plugged
into the local power source.  He had worked in several local Republican
campaigns, and among his friends he counted city commissioners and
State Attorney John Tanner, for whom Kouracos had once worked as an
unpaid aide.  To Deidre's eye, Kouracos must certainly have seemed like
a fellow who could have squired any number of young ladies about town,
but he had chosen her.

Kouracos, who was licensed as a firearm dealer, told Deidre that he had
met Kosta at an International House of Pancakes, where Kosta had been
introduced to him as a fellow gun enthusiast.  Kouracos took Kosta
outside and showed him a new shotgun, and before long they were fast
friends.  "I was an usher at their wedding," he told her.

Kouracos and Deidre went first to City Hall to watch the vote count
come in, and it was there that Kouracos observed what he would regard
as Deidre's finest quality: her ability to do arithmetic quickly in her
head.  As the votes came in from different areas Deidre was able to
immediately move them to the correct columns in her head and call out
the totals for each candidate.

"She had an incredible facility for juggling numbers in her head, and
counting votes," Kouracos says.

Later they went to a party at the home of City Commissioner Bud
Asher.

Asher and his wife, Dawn, were taken with Deidre, who had worn an
alluring new dress for the occasion.  Later, the Ashers told Peter that
Deidre had been the life of the party.

Peter wasn't so sure.  Just before the couple left the Asher home that
night, Deidre did something to embarrass KourDeidre acos in front of
his friends.  Dawn Asher had bought dozens of submarine sandwiches at
The Subway for the party.

Now, as the party wound down, Deidre asked if she could take home the
leftovers.  Dawn Asher told her she could.

"Great.  I'll cut them up into smaller pieces and sell them for a buck
each at Top Shots," Deidre announced.  Peter turned red.  Later, Deidre
told him that she had been only kidding.  But Peter thinks she was
serious.  Kouracos says he didn't want to take Deidre out again.

But he did take her out, this time for the general election.

He took her, he says, because she was good with numbers.

If Deidre Hunt had taken a minor role in the lives of Daytona's
establishment Republicans, she had during that same strange autumn of
1989 been cast as leading lady, opposite Kosta Fotopoulos, in an
unfolding drama that was complicated enough to make any soap opera seem
like Sesame Street.  The people in Deidre's new social circle smoked
crack, sniffed cocaine, swapped sex partners, passed counterfeit money,
blew up automobiles, mugged tourists, burglarized motel rooms, sold
guns, bragged about murders, engaged in sex-booze-drug orgies, and got
drunk on a regular basis.  They were this girl's new boyfriend, that
boy's ex-girlfriend, guys who had run away from home, girls on
probation, cell mates, and lovers.  Some of them had jobs and obeyed
most laws.  Others were hookers, dope dealers, thieves, and con
artists.  And what seems most surprising, until you stop and think
about it, is that they were for the most part children.  Few of them
were over twenty-one.

But Jack Levin says we should not be surprised that most of the
criminals who hung out on the boardwalk were kids.

"Adolescence is a period of rebellion," Levin says, "and at the
extremes you find a lot of teenagers who turn our mainstream values on
their head.  We had beatniks, hippies, the counterculture, punks, and
now we've got skinheads.  Their reason for being is to rebel against
peace, harmony, brotherhood, and love.  You could argue that almost
every teenager is a sociopath, but only for a few years.  The teens are
violence-prone years.  Teenagers commit the majority of violent
crimes."

Levin has both good news and bad news.

The good news: "Most adult criminals have had juvenile records, but
most juvenile offenders don't continue to be adult criminals."

The bad news: "Teenage crime is a growing problem in America and I
think we have to blame the baby boomers.

During the early seventies all the emphasis was on telling your kids
that excessive guilt was bad.  Look up the psychology books of that
period.  Almost all of them advise people to be assertive and not feel
guilty when doing the wrong thing.  Some people on the edge might view
that as a license to kill.  We might have created a few more
sociopaths."

In the beginning all these kids, the ones who were sociopaths and the
ones who weren't, liked Deidre.

"She was like a hero to us," one of them says.

Deidre, who was known on the boardwalk as "Cherri," was a fun girl, a
regular spark plug.  And she was a good dancer.  During this time
Deidre had plenty of money, which she got from Kosta, and it was money
that she gladly shared with her friends.  People who know Deidre will
tell you she is a generous kid, always quick with a favor or a few
bucks if a friend needs it.

Among Deidre's new Daytona friends, in addition to J. R were: Mike Cox,
age eighteen, whose real name was Matthew Eugene Chumbley, and who was
known as "Matt."  Matt was down from his home state of Kentucky, where
he had spent time in correctional schools for being a runaway and
committing thefts.

Mark Kevin Ramsey, eighteen, worked for Kosta at Top Shots.  Kevin had
sidelines, though.  Among them: drugs, prostitutes, blackmail.

Yvonne Lori Henderson, seventeen, known as "Lori," was Deidre's lesbian
lover and constant companion during the summer of 1989.

Teja Mzimmia James, seventeen, known as Teja, or "T.  J" was Lori's
black boyfriend, an expert on explosives.

Bryan Chase, eighteen.  Bryan Chase, who lived with his father and
stepmother in Daytona Beach, had a job and no police record.  He was,
according to his friends and folks, "a nice kid."

There were dozens of others, characters like: Peaches and Tiger,
hookers; Rick, described by one friend as "a truly great car thief";
and Joey Tat (short for "Tattoo"), who told everybody on the boardwalk
that he was an undercover cop, which gives you an idea of how bright he
was.

So it was in this world, among these people, that Kosta lived out his
secret life, bragged of his exploits with the CIA, made elaborate plans
for heists, and plotted murder.

For a long time Kosta got away with dealing in counterfeit money, with
running prostitutes, with insurance fraud, and with crimes far more
hideous, not because he so carefully hid the truth, but because the
truth was so farfetched.  The fact is that Kosta told dozens of people
what he was up to.  The people who believed him were not the sort who
would go to the police.  And the people who would go to the police
didn't believe him.  They were like the bank teller who thought Kosta
was so funny when he looked at the counterfeit hundred she showed him
and said, "Must be one of mine."

Vinnie Speziale, for example, thought little of it when he and Kosta
used to sit at the bar at Top Shots and sketch out elaborate plans for
robberies.

"I heard him say things like, "I'm going to plan an armed robbery."  He
wanted to rob McDonald's, wanted to knock over armored cars.  Okay?

But this was the same gentleman that every morning when I would go down
to open Top Shots, I would first go by Joyland and he'd be at the end
of the counter reading five dollars' worth of guerrilla warfare comic
books.  Okay?  And I said, "Kosta, why do you waste your money reading
those stupid comic books?"  Because they give me good ideas,' he'd say,
"I get a lot of good ideas."  I'd say, "Fine."  I thought he was a kid
in a man's body is what I thought.

"Now I think if you got those comic books, everything we did was
probably in those comic books."

With Speziale, as with others, Kosta often admitted to rimes or
intended crimes, all the while smiling like a kid and practically
daring people to believe him.  At one point after Speziale and Kosta
had caught Kevin Ramsey stealing from the bar Kosta told Speziale that
he was going to have Kevin Ramsey killed.  But again Speziale took it
as just talk.

"Kosta was going to have everybody killed," he says.

"You know, he'd say, "I don't like that son of a bitch.

He's stealing from me.  I'm going to kill him."  I mean that was the
way the man talked.  That was his way of putting it.

very other word was, "I'm going to kill that person."  whether he was
trying to intimidate me or impress me, I don't know."

Jack Levin says that this casual talk about murder is typical of
sociopaths.

"When Kosta or any other sociopath talks like that, he might be
testing," Levin says.  "He may be trying to find some acquaintances who
have the same need.  By talking about something so gruesome in a light,
humorous way, he doesn't attract attention to himself.  He can test out
to see if they have the same interest, but he knows that they ~~,
people going to take him seriously."' Kosta also told Speziale that he
had tapes of him torturing people.  He offered to show them to
Speziale, but Speziile, thinking it was just crazy talk, declined.

Kosta even confided to Speziale what would turn out to be Kosta's
deadliest secret, and the deed for which he would become most
infamous.

"During the course of the relationship between Kosta and Deidre Hunt,
they were getting kind of hot and heavy," Speziale says, "and I kept
seeing him doing ignorant stupid things that I thought would end up
getting him in trouble with his wife, causing him to have a divorce or
marital problems.  He was very blatant about the things he did, always
thinking he was making a big secret of it when everybody was knowing
what was going on, leaving a trail behind him like bread crumbs,
flaunting with her.

"I tried to talk to him.  I said, "You know, this girl's going to get
you in a lot of trouble."  I said, "Look what you have and look what
you're sacrificing for."  I felt Kosta was a respectable businessman, a
well-to-do man with a beautiful wife, with a wealthy wife with a good
family, the whole nine yards.  I just thought that he was throwing it
all away.

"So I said, "You know, this girl could bribe you, she could do anything
to you."  He said she could never do anything to him because he had a
tape of her.  He said he had a tape of her killing somebody."

The Joyland Amusement Center is on the northern end of the boardwalk,
literally in the shadow of the vast new forty-seven-million-dollar
Marriott Hotel complex.  Joyland a clanging, blipping, whooping arcade
of coin-operated Dames with names like Cyberball, Chase HQ, Operation
Fhunderbolt, and Pole Position.

When business is good and the place is filled with teenagers and
families zapping space Invaders, wheeling around hairpin turns, and
firing make-believe Uzis at make-believe gangsters, the arcade sounds
like a convention of E2-D2s.

On the left side of Joyland as you walk in off the boardwalk, there is
a long snack bar, where you can sit on a stool, eat a hot dog with
sauerkraut, and stare out at the ocean.  Directly across from the snack
bar is an old-fashoned shooting gallery with rifles that fire strobe
lights at piano man, a dodo bird, and various other targets.

Going deeper into Joyland on the right side, there are basketball
hoops, where teenaged boys can indulge their carry Bird fantasies by
sinking as many baskets as they can for a quarter before time runs
out.

Beyond that there is a tank of Skee-Ball games, an attraction from the
earliest The early days of the boardwalk that now seems quaint in a
room full of high-tech entertainment.  Way down at the back of the
arcade there are glass cases filled with the prizes you can buy with
the tickets you win by rolling up big scores on the games.  All in all,
the place is a lot of fun.

To the right of the prize counter, behind a locked door, there is an
L-shaped office.  It is a cramped, unexquisite place.  Lit only by
overhead fluorescence, it has no windows.  Strictly functional, the
office is cluttered with a coupIe of heavy old desks and chairs, odd
parts from broken games, a new machine that counts and rolls quarters,
and the blizzard of paperwork it takes to run a business.

Early on the night of Wednesday, October 25, 1989, the evening of her
second auto mishap, Lisa was sitting at her desk, paying bills.

She fidgeted as she added up the checks she had just written.

Usually she liked working with numbers.  There was something reassuring
in the long columns that would always come out the same if you did it
right, just as they had when she was a little girl adding up her
father's numbers.  She liked to believe that if you did the right
things life would come out okay, too.  But tonight as her fingers
rapidly tapped out the numbers on her calculator, Lisa wasn't doing it
right.  She was making mistakes.

Because of the second incident with the pickup truck, she was
rattled.

So when the phone rang, it startled her.

She looked up to see if her husband would answer it.

Kosta was standing at the front of the office, talking with Peter
Kouracos.  Kosta glanced at her, then went back to his conversation.

Lisa grabbed the phone.  Little did she know this was the call that
would change her life.

"Joyland," Lisa said.

"Lisa, it'sElena."

"Hi, Elena," Lisa said.  It was Elena Speziale, Vinnie Speziale's
wife.

Since Vinnie had taken the job managing Top Shots, Lisa and Elena had
become friends.  They had gone shopping together and taken in a few
movies.  They weren't best friends, but they were close enough to share
personal things.  Now Elena sounded troubled.

"What's up?"  Lisa asked.

"There's something I have to tell you," Elena said.

"What?"

"I think you should have your husband watched by a private
detective."

"Kos .  . . ?"  Lisa started to say, before she cut herself off,
realizing she would draw Kosta's attention.  She changed her tone and
lowered her voice.  "What?  What are you talking about?"

"I just think you should, that's all," Elena said.

"Why?  Elena, I don't understand, what are you getting at?"  Lisa's
fingers, no longer tapping out numbers, were rapping nervously on the
desktop.

"Are you alone?"

Lisa glanced up.  "Well, no," she said.  Kosta was flashing new issue
of Soldier of Fortune magazine in front of Peter.

leither man seemed to notice Lisa.

"Thirteen-round, staggered-column, box-type magazine," Kosta was
saying.  It was gun talk, the kind that Lisa often was all Greek to
her.  "Kosta and Peter are here," he said.  "What's going on?"

"I just think you should have Kosta watched by a private detective,
that's all," Elena said.

Lisa reached around to her pocketbook, which was slung over her
chair.

She fumbled in it until she came up with a pack of cigarettes.

She pulled one out and lit it.  Kosta gave her a disapproving glance,
then turned back to his conversation.  This was making Lisa nervous.

Jesus, was Kosta doing something illegal?  She looked up at her
husband, who, smiling in his boyish way, was laughing with Peter.  He's
such a kid, Lisa thought.  No, he couldn't be doing anything illegal.

It's impossible.

"Elena, are you at home?"

"Yes."

"Stay there.  I'll call you in a few minutes."

Lisa's hands were shaking as she put down the phone, then slammed shut
her ledgers and her business checkbook.  She placed her bills and other
papers in neat piles and slipped them into the top drawer of the
desk.

Even if she was going to leave the office a mess, she wanted the work
at hand to be orderly.

"I have to go out for a little while," she announced to the men, her
voice stiff.  Kosta and Peter barely glanced at her, and in a moment
she was out of the office.  She strode across the back of the noisy
amusement center and up the short flight of steps that led from the
back of Joyland to Ocean Avenue, where she always parked the Porsche.

As she moved along the sidewalk to her car she heard a group of teenage
boys whistle at her.  Men, she thought.  If Kosta is doing anything
illegal I'll leave him.

Lisa drove up North Atlantic Avenue, took a left at Seabreeze, and then
a right on Halifax Avenue.  The tourist trade in Daytona Beach only
runs two blocks deep from the ocean, and Halifax is a residential area,
a lovely and affluent tree-lined street where stylish houses stand
beyond deep and well-groomed lawns.  Five minutes later Lisa steered
the Porsche into the long horseshoe driveway of her mother's house on
Halifax, where she and Kosta had been living since Steno had died.

Even now, with so much on her mind, she could not pull up to the house
without Ithinking about her father.  It had been two years since his
death and she still missed him terribly.

Once inside the house, Lisa rushed upstairs to her bedroom, where she
quickly dialed Elena's number.

"I'm alone now," she said.  "What the hell is going on?

Hire a detective?  What do you mean, hire a detective?"

While she spoke Lisa fidgeted with her pack of cigarettes.

She pulled out a fresh one and lit it.  "You've got me shaking like a
leaf here."

"Look," Elena said, "I don't want to get in the middle of anything, but
you're my friend and .  .

"It's okay.  You're doing the right thing.  Just tell me what it is."

"Well just do what I'm saying.  Hire a private detective and have him
watch Kosta, that's all."

"Elena, for God's sake!  Don't make me hire a private detective and
wait a week before I find out what's going on.  You're my friend, tell
me."

"Okay, but you have to promise me one thing."

"What?"

"That you won't tell Kosta who told you."

"Okay, I promise," Lisa said.  "Told me what, what?"

"I mean you really have to promise," Elena said.  "You just cannot tell
Kosta that it was me."

"I promise, I promise."

There was a long silence.  For a moment Lisa thought that she had gone
dead.  Then Elena said, "I think Kosta is having an affair."

Lisa went cold.  She couldn't speak.  She felt a pain in her chest,
like a clenched fist crushing her heart.  He's going to break my heart,
she thought, he's going to break my heart.

"An affair?"  she whispered.  "How?  With who?"

"One of the girl's at Top Shots," Elena said.

"Is it Holly?"  Lisa said.  Holly, one of the harmaids at Top Shots,
was the only name that made sense.  Holly was pretty.  Holly was
smart.

Holly had class.

"No," Elena said.  "It's Deidre."

"Deidre?"  Lisa said.  "No, that can't be.  What the hell does Deidre
got that would attract anybody?"

From a woman's perspective, Lisa's question made a certain amount of
sense.  Deidre Hunt was a street girl, sometimes vulgar, often pushy.

She was not exactly the kind of Soul a fellow wants to bring home to
mom.  But a man would certainly have seen the enticing things about
Deidre that were lost on Lisa.  Deidre was quite an attractive young
"woman, with a slim and curvaceous body, a beautiful face, and a pair
of seductive brown eyes that could lure many of Them away from home for
at least a few hours.  That which The Jr was "low class" about Deidre
to most people might easily translate into "earthy" for a man who had
fallen under her spell.  And in the right light, accompanied by a whiff
of perfume, "pushy" could certainly be mistaken for flllirtatious."

"Deidre?"  Lisa said again, disgustedly.  If Kosta was having an affair
with Deidre, he had compounded the sin of adultery with that of poor
taste.

"Don't say anything," Elena urged.  "Find out for sure.

Hire a private detective."

"I don't know," Lisa said.

"There's more," Elena said.

"God."

"He's buying her clothes.  He keeps her in an apartment."

"Who's saying these things?"  Lisa asked.

"Deidre.  She's shooting off her mouth about it."

Lisa hung up the phone.  For the second time that day, she was a
wreck.

She paced the bedroom, her arms wrapped around her aching chest.

"Okay God, don't you think enough is enough!"  she said out loud.

After she had paced and prayed for this thing not to be true, Lisa did
what she would predictably do in such desperate times.

She tried to find Dina.  Dina would help her, he would give her good
advice.

Lisa called Joyland to see if Dina had come into the office.  When
Kosta answered the phone Lisa hung up.

She called Dina's friend Timmy but there was no answer.

She called their cousin, also named Dina.  She called her cousins Vicki
and John to see if they knew where Dina was.  But Dina was not
around.

Probably playing basketball with Timmy, she thought.  She considered
going downstairs and asking her mother where Dina was, but Lisa was
afraid that her mother would spot the quaver in her voice, the sadness
in her eyes.  Ma would know that something was wrong, and then the
questions would never end.

Next Lisa called her aunt who owned a gift shop on the boardwalk.

Do you know anything about Kosta seeing another woman?  The aunt knew
nothing.  Lisa was relieved.

Usually every Greek in town knew what every other Greek in town was up
to.  Perhaps there was no affair, after all.

But maybe there is, she thought, again holding herself tightly because
there was no one else there to hold her.

Maybe he is seeing that woman, she thought.  She cried.

Maybe Kosta is about to break my heart.  What will I do?

She sat on her bed, soaking her hands with tears.  Lisa had seen Deidre
many times at Top Shots and had never sensed any rivalry with her,
except that Deidre often admired Lisa's clothes and jewelry.  In fact,
Deidre had once told Vinnie Speziale that Lisa was her idea of a "real
lady."  Lisa was flattered when Vinnie told her about the comment.  But
now, in light of this rumor, an odd incident from a week earlier, the
night after the first auto mishap, took on new meaning.  Lisa pulled
tissues from the box on her night table and wiped at her eyes while she
thought about it.

"It was eleven-thirty at night and I was watching Simon and Simon,"
Lisa remembers.  "Kosta said, "Honey, I'm going to take a ride on my
bike."  It seemed a little weird to go for a bike ride at that hour but
I said, "Okay, fine."  About a half hour later he calls me.

"I'm at Top Shots,' he says.  "We're going to close in a little while,
okay, honey?"  I said, "Fine."  I didn't care, I was watching my TV
show.

Then a little before twelve-thirty he calls again.  "Hi, honey, now I'm
at Angelo's.  And Peter's here, we're just hanging around and watching
movies, do you mind?"  It was just getting to the good part on Simon
and Simon, so I said, "Fine fine, talk to you later,' and I hung up.

Next thing I know, Kosta comes running in.  I said, "I thought you were
at Angelo's?"  He says, "I was, but I came home.  I thought you were
mad at me."  At that moment my mind clicked and I thought, ah, guilty
conscience.  I said, "No, I'm not mad at you.  I was just distracted
because I was watching the show."  So Kosta says, "You're not mad at
me?"  "No."  "Good,' he says, "then I guess I'll go back."

"Kosta,' I said, "I'm not mad at you, but I don't think it's very nice
that you came all the way home and now you're going back and you're not
even going to invite me to join you."  "Oh, you want to come?"  he
says.  "Yes,' I said.  By this time it was one o'clock in the
morning.

So we went over to Angelo's, and Peter's there.  And Deidre is there.

So that's what the guilty conscience is about, I thought.  I didn't
make any connection that anything was going on with Kosta and Deidre,
but I thought, He feels guilty just that there's a girl there at all.

So everybody is drinking beer and Angelo decides he'll make spaghetti
at two in the morning.  I talked to Deidre for a while.  She started
talking about, "Gee, if you ever divorced Kosta you could take him for
fifty percent of what he has."  And then Peter spoke up.

"Yeah,' he says, "but the problem is it's not Kosta's stuff, it's all
Lisa's."  We all laughed over that.  Then Deidre started telling me
about what they were doing earlier.  They were calling all of Peter's
friends and leaving dirty messages.  This is how they were having
fun.

Deidre turned to me and she says, "You know what I said?"  I said,
"What did you say?"  She wouldn't tell me.  "Come on, I said, "what did
you say?"  She was embarrassed to tell me.  She wouldn't tell me, but I
kept saying, "Oh come on, tell me,' and finally she said, "Well, I said
. .

. ," and she blurts out this incredibly outrageous thing she had
said.

It was real suggestive.  I was shocked, and I don't shock that
easily.

"When I got in the car with Kosta to go home I told Kosta, I said, "I
can't believe a person would say a thing like that.  You couldn't pay
me a million dollars to say those things over the phone to someone,
even if they didn't know me."  Kosta just thought it was kind of
funny."

By the time Lisa's tears had dried, she had decided to confront her
husband with the accusation.

She and Kosta had planned to go to a late movie that night with Peter
Kouracos, who often was the third wheel when they went out.  But Lisa
managed to pry Peter out of the date so that she could confront Kosta
during the drive to the theater.

As they drove west across Volusia Boulevard toward the theater complex
Lisa rehearsed in her mind different versions of what she would say.

Should she be subtle?  Should she just blurt it out?  Should she try to
somehow trick Kosta into admitting that he was an adulterer?

She was still on edge, although a shade or two calmer than when she had
spoken to Elena.  They were in Kosta's BMW, which meant she was not
allowed to smoke.

"Kosta," she finally said while they were waiting for the light to
change at Ridgewood, "somebody called me today and said you are having
an affair with Deidre."

She stared right at him.  What Kosta did or said now could signal the
end of her marriage.  The idea of divorce horrified her, but the idea
of living with a cheat horrified her even more.  Would he admit it, she
wondered.  Would he lie?

More than anything else, Kosta looked startled.  His eyes flashed with
anger.  But that told Lisa nothing.  Her words would make him angry,
whether the charge was true or not.

"Deidre?"  he said, forcing a smile.  "No.  She's too fat."

"Look," Lisa said, "if you're having an affair, you'd better fess up to
it now.  I know I always told you I would leave you if there was
another woman but maybe there's a chance we could work it out if you
tell me now."

"It's not true," Kosta said.

"But if it's true," Lisa went on, "and you don't tell me now, then I'll
definitely leave you, because then you'll be a liar as well as a
cheat."

Lisa was bluffing and she figured Kosta knew it.  The truth is there
would be no second chance for any husband of hers who slept with
another woman.  If Lisa knew that she was married to a man she couldn't
trust, she could never feel whole, she could never have a baby.  Much
as she loved Kosta, Lisa knew she would be crushed by a life of
jealousy, that she would be made bitter and hostile by the knowledge
that her love was being given to a man who placed so little value on
it.  No, if this thing was true, she would not continue.  She would
send Rambo packing, pure and simple.

Kosta turned to her now.  He flashed his handsome smile.  He laughed.

"I'm not seeing any other women, you have my word on that."  He reached
across the seat, patted her hand.

"But, Lisa, I want you to do something for me."

"What?"

"I want you to give me the name of the person who told you this.

It's some sort of misunderstanding.  I'll get it all straightened
out."

"I can't do that," Lisa said.

Kosta's hand on hers suddenly felt cold.

"Who told you this?"  Kosta said.

"Is it true?"  Lisa asked.

"Of course it's not true.  But you have to tell me who told you
this."

"I can't do that."

"You have to," Kosta said.

"Why?"

Kosta looked straight ahead at the traffic.  "Because," he said, "it's
like someone is shooting at me from across the street, trying to ruin
my life, and I don't know who it is."

"Kosta," Lisa said, "a person told me this because that person cares
about me.  I'm not going to betray that by telling you who it is."

Though Kosta did not get the name he wanted, he had succeeded, as he
had so often before, in changing the focus of the conversation.  The
couple spent the rest of the drive arguing not about the alleged
affair, but about whether or not Kosta was entitled to the name of the
snitch.  Kosta, who, of course, had rarely shown emotion during the
four years of their marriage, was volatile.  It was as if he had been
the one stabbed in the back.

At the movies Lisa and Kosta held hands uneasily.  Both could feel the
tension between them.  In the car on the way home the discussion began
again.  Kosta insisted so vociferously that someone was telling lies
about him that by bedtime Lisa was completely confused.  Maybe she
should hire a private detective, she thought.  Maybe it really was all
a mistake.

The next day, Thursday, October 26, Lisa, who had always trusted Kosta
and had always let him go his own way, became the clinging vine.

When Kosta went to the 7-Eleven for a six-pack of Coke Lisa went with
him.  When Kosta went to the bank to make a Joyland deposit, Lisa went
with him.  Lisa, the woman who didn't have enough hours in the day for
all her work, suddenly had nothing to do but follow Kosta around like a
probation officer.

All day long they squabbled about the Deidre thing.  Lisa insisted that
they have a real conversation about the alleged affair.  Kosta refused
to talk about it, except to deny the affair and demand the name of the
person who had told Lisa.

That night Kosta, still steaming about the fact that she wouldn't give
him the name, was in the Joyland office with Lisa.  At one point Kosta
picked up a small wooden coffee table and started banging it up and
down.  He smashed the table into bits, demanding the name of the person
who was out to get him.  Lisa had never seen him like this.

Lisa was unrelenting.  She refused to turn over the name.

Finally, Kosta gave her a fiery-eyed stare and said, "If you don't tell
me who said I was seeing Deidre I will kill your brother."

It was a shocking thing for him to say, even though Lisa would not even
imagine at the time that the man she loved was capable of murder.

"How can you say an awful thing like that to me?"  she asked.

"Because the only way I can get you to tell me is to kill the person
you love most in the world," Kosta said.

The message was clear: you love Dina more than you love me.  And also,
typical of Kosta, it shifted the focus from one of his sins to one of
hers.

Kosta did give in to Lisa on one point, but acquiescence was itself
damning.  He agreed to fire Deidre.  "Okay," Kosta said, when Lisa
asked that the girl be fired.  To Lisa that was almost a confession
that he was having an affair, because it was unlike Kosta to agree so
quickly to anything.

He was not a man who surrendered.  Usually he would insist that he was
right and that everybody else was wrong.

Kosta had always taken the view that he was smarter than everybody
else.  Though he had never said it in so many words he had always left
the impression that he thought he was even above the law.

The next night, Friday, October 27, Kosta and Lisa ate at Denny's on
Broadway, the very location that Kosta had wanted to buy for his own
Denny's franchise.  Things were less combative than they had been at
Joyland.  Lisa, hopeful to the point of self-delusion, was a long way
from being positive that an affair really existed, and she wanted to
make peace.  Kosta had agreed to fire Deidre and that was a step in the
right direction.  She brought it up again while they waited for their
meals.  Kosta, dripping charm from every pore, had seemed genuinely sad
that such turbulence had come into the marriage.  He had spent the day
trying to please Lisa.  "I'll make sure she's out," he said now.  He
jumped up from the table and went to the pay phone to call Angelo at
Top Shots.  After a minute Kosta waved to Lisa to come to the phone.

"Here, speak to Angelo," he told her.

Lisa got on the phone.  "Did you fire her?"  Lisa asked.

"Well, no," Angelo said.  "See, I talked to Dennis."

"Dennis?"  Lisa said.  "What's Dennis got to do with it?"

Dennis was an officer with the Daytona Beach police department, a
regular on the boardwalk beat.

"Dennis asked me not to fire her," Angelo said.  "The cops want to
watch her."

"I don't care if the police want to watch her," Lisa said.

"Let them watch her somewhere else.  There's talk that Kosta is seeing
Deidre and.  . ."  The words caught in Lisa's throat.  All day long she
had been hiding her sadness with anger and now she was near tears.  "I
just want her out of our lives, that's all."

"Well, I can understand that," Angelo said.  "But I want to help the
police in any way I can."

"Have Dennis talk to me," Lisa said.

The next day, Saturday the 28th, Dennis came to Joyland and talk to
Lisa and Dina in the office.

Lisa describes the meeting this way: "He said, "We'd really prefer it
if Deidre stayed at Top Shots."  I asked him why.  "Well, we think
she's selling drugs and we want to catch her.  We think she's a
prostitute, too."  I said, "Oh, great, you're telling me you want to
keep her on the job because you want to bust her?"  Meanwhile here I
am, Miss lean-Up-the-Boardwalk, and I'm supposed to keep a lope-pushing
hooker in my husband's employ.  What kind of example would I be
setting?  I didn't want anybody working for us who even took drugs,
never mind sold them.  I said, "Dennis, if she's as bad as you say
you'll catch her doing something.", In one sense that conversation was
a great relief to Lisa.

Until then she had felt terribly guilty about having Deidre fired.

What if the girl wasn't fooling around with Kosta?

But it didn't matter; there were other reasons to fire her.

"One other thing," Dennis said that day.

"What?"

"We've heard that she carries a silver pistol in her pocketbook.

You know anything about that?"

"No."

"You won't let her stay?"

"No.  I'm sorry, " Lisa told him.  "There are personal reasons why I
want her out and I can't risk the boardwalk's reputation or my
husband's."

The next incident involving Deidre occurred that same night.

There was a Greek dance at the Hilton Hotel on The air South
Atlantic.

It was a yearly event, but this one was special; they were burning the
church's mortgage.

Instead of floating around and talking to friends as he normally would,
Kosta stayed close to Lisa.  Brimming with affection, he tended to her
every need.  Another glass of wine, honey'?  You look great in that
dress.  The aunts and cousins who were sitting at the same table made
the old jokes about how jealous it made them.  It was the first time in
ages.  Lisa was very touched by all the attention.  He's trying to show
me he loves me, she thought.  He knows I'm afraid about the affair and
he's trying to make it up to me.

After the dance somebody suggested that everybody go to Razzles, the
popular Daytona Beach nightclub that is owned by a Paspalakis family
friend.  Going to Razzles was a regular thing with Lisa's group of
friends, most of whom, like Lisa and Kosta, were in their late
twenties.  But, lately, it had been unusual for Kosta to join them.

This time he thought it was a great idea.

"What's with Kosta?"  Dina asked.  "All of sudden he wants to go to
Razzles."

At Razzles, Kosta's attention and his affection continued.

Lisa had a wonderful time.  The only distressing moment came when they
were on their way out with Peter Kouracos.  Deidre came over and asked
Peter to stop and talk with her.  Lisa, ignoring the younger woman,
left with Kosta.

"On the way home I told Kosta that I was worried about Deidre.  We were
scheduled to go back to Razzles a few nights later for a big Halloween
party.  But now that I knew that Deidre went to Razzles I was afraid
that she might be there on Halloween and she might make a big scene in
front of my friends and family.  After all, I had gotten her fired."

When Lisa and Kosta got home it was already early morning of the 29th
and at two A.M. the phone rang.  It was Peter Kouracos calling for
Lisa.

"You're probably wondering what Deidre and I were Lori Henderson
(photo by Daytona News Journal) "1~."

Deidre Hunt (photo by Daytona News Journal) The ,yalr also wanted
bulletproof glass on the windows to his workshop.

Lisa was amused.

"Bulletproof glass?  Really, Kosta.  What do you think, Al Capone's
boys are going to drive by and try to assassinate you?"

It was fun to tease Kosta.  They held hands as they walked the floor at
the home show.  Again, Lisa's pain was easing.

Later that afternoon the fist was back, crushing her heart.

"I was talking to Dina on the telephone.  It was a rainy Sunday
afternoon and next thing, I noticed that Kosta was gone.  So I hung up
with Dina and I got in my car and I went down to where Deidre lived,
because Pete had told me where she lived."

He's with her, Lisa thought.  Lisa drove the rain-slicked streets to
the house Deidre lived in on Lenox Avenue, nine blocks south of the
boardwalk, a quiet residential street of palm trees and small pastel
houses.  Kosta's BMW was in the driveway.  Lisa pulled over and stared
at the house.

Her stomach was a knot.  Should she go in, she wondered.

Should she burst in, guns ablazing, the outraged cuckolded wife?

Or should she be the quiet little woman who sits idly by while her
husband fucks some vulgar dope-dealing bitch.  Before Lisa could decide
what to do, Kosta came out the front door and got into his car.  As he
pulled out on Lenox, Lisa followed him.

Kosta, apparently spotting Lisa in his rearview mirror, drove faster.

At the first corner he signaled left, but turned right.  Lisa pushed
the Porsche as hard as she dared on the corner.  She caught up with
Kosta, her bumper almost kissing his BMW.  Kosta slowed at a yellow
light, then sprinted through it.  Lisa ran the light.  What the hell is
he going to do, she wondered, try to lose me and then deny it was
him?

Kosta took a left; she went after him.  He took a right, then another
right.  She followed him.  Then she came around a corner after him.

Moving too fast she lost control of the Porsche for a moment and almost
crashed into Mac's Famous Bar.  What's happening to me, she thought,
I'm in a high-speed car chase with my husband.  When she got the car
back under control she had lost Kosta.

Lisa, cautiously now, and taking deep breaths to calm herself, drove up
and down the streets around Lenox, thinking Kosta might have turned
back and headed for the shelter of his girlfriend's house.  But there
was no sign of Kosta's BMW.  He had gotten away.  "Son of a bitch," she
muttered.  She turned the Porsche around and drove back to the
boardwalk.

A few hours later Kosta showed up at Joyland.

"Damn you," she said, "Damn you.  You were with her.

Don't deny it."

He admitted he'd been at Deidre's but said he had no idea that Lisa had
chased him.  He explained that he had gone to Deidre's to tell her to
stay out of their life.

"I know she's not interested in me," he said, "but I told her you were
jealous, that you thought there was something going on, and I told her
to stay away."

Once again Lisa's certainty was shaken.  She'd been obsessing about
this Deidre thing.  Maybe she was just getting paranoid.  What Kosta
was saying was plausible.

"You could have called her on the telephone," Lisa said.

"You didn't have to go there."  But she knew that going there was
Kosta's style.  He liked to confront things head on.  Was he or wasn't
he having an affair with Deidre?  This was driving her crazy.

Before long Kosta deflected the conversation.  A few days before this
he had gone into the woods to dig up some guns he had buried, and he
couldn't find them, which Lisa thought was hilarious.  "Some
survivalist," she had teased.

"You can't even find your guns."  Now, at Joyland, Kosta explained that
after leaving Deidre's he had gone to rent a metal detector so that he
could look for his guns.  The reference to the lost guns put Lisa in a
better mood.  Sometimes Kosta was a bit of a buffoon and when Lisa was
reminded of that, it seemed that only a woman who truly loved him, the
way Lisa did, would be after him.  Would a woman like Deidre really
have an affair with a man who couldn't even remember where he buried
his guns?

"Come on, I'll show you the metal detector," Kosta insisted.  He led
Lisa out to his car, popped the trunk, and proudly showed her the metal
detector.

"See, I wasn't lying," he said smugly, as if the fact that he really
had rented the metal detector somehow proved that he hadn't been in bed
with Deidre earlier.

Later, at home, Lisa told Kosta that she'd been obsessed with this
Deidre thing and she had to talk about it.  "I mean really talk," she
said.  "Not just brush it off."

She also told Kosta that she did not want to go to the Halloween party
at Razzles.

"I'm just so afraid that this girl is going to make a scene in front of
all my friends and family," she said.  "I mean what does she care,
she's a street person.  I don't want a scene.  I don't want all those
people knowing my business."

Kosta insisted that Lisa go to the party.  Everything would be okay, he
said.  He insisted that she call Deidre.

"I'm going to call her," he said.  "You'll see that there is nothing to
worry about."

Kosta called Deidre, and put Lisa on the phone.

"Deidre said to me, "I can't believe you'd think I'd have an affair
with your husband.  I wear purple tights and pink tops and I dance like
a nigger."  I said, "Huh?"  She said, "I'm not his type.

Kosta is a classy guy.  Anyway, I wouldn't do that sort of thing."

She told me if I didn't believe her I could ask her mother.  She said,
"I would never get involved with a married man.  You didn't have to get
me fired."  So I said, "Well, I'm sorry if I'm wrong, but employees are
easy to find.  And you can always get another job.  But if you might be
causing trouble in my marriage I have to get you out of there."  "Well,
I can understand that,' Deidre said.  "If it were my husband I'd
probably do the same thing."  So we talked for a few more minutes.

Deidre told me there were no hard feelings, that she would get another
job somewhere.  She said she'd appreciate a nod if I saw her.

I hung up, thinking it had been a real woman-to-woman talk and that
Deidre had been rather pleasant about the whole thing."

The conversation with Deidre went a long way toward lowering Lisa's
anxiety level.  Perhaps I'm just on edge because of everything, she
thought.  The car accidents, the redevelopment talks, Elena's call.

More and more Lisa was feeling that this crisis could be put to rest if
she and Kosta could have just one decent conversation about it.

She just needed to express her feelings without Kosta telling her she
was crazy or demanding the name of the person who had called.  She just
needed to know that Kosta loved her, that this marriage of theirs was
real, that it meant as much to him as to her.  There had been grief
between them since the miscarriage.  Maybe, if they could just have an
intimate conversation in which she told Kosta how much she loved him,
and he told her how much he loved her, and gripes were aired, they
could recapture the feelings that had brought them together.

Once more she insisted that they talk.  This time Kosta agreed.

"Okay," he said, "we'll have a good talk about it.

November fourth."

"November fourth?"

Kosta reminded her that he and she were scheduled to go SCUBA diving
with friends on Key West on November 4th.

"It's a three-hour drive," Kosta said.  "If you promise not to bring it
up until then, I promise you we will talk about it on the drive to Key
West."

"Fair enough," Lisa said, and they shook hands.  Kosta kissed her
gently.  "Good girl," he said.

He also asked her to please go to the Halloween party.

It was very important to him that she go.

The Halloween party, on Tuesday night, was, from Lisa's point of view,
of no particular significance, except for her anxieties about Deidre.

Later Lisa would learn that she had been marked for murder at that
party, that she had been within inches of a man who held the knife that
was supposed to be shoved into her.

"I wore a cowgirl costume with shorts," she says.  "Kosta wore his
graduation robe, with the black hood, and he also had a brown devil's
mask that looked like a face carved on a totem pole.  We went to a
private party first, then to Razzles.  There were a lot of people there
whom I hadn't seen for a while, so I was talking with people at my
table, and at the bar.  I was always with people.  When I went to the
rest room there was always some other woman who went with me, the way
women do.  So I was never really alone.  I didn't know that somebody
was trying to kill me.

At one point, when they first got to the party at Razzles, Lisa noticed
someone wearing a Freddy Kruger costume and made a comment to Kosta
about how easy it would be for someone to kill someone on Halloween,
since they could wear a mask without raising suspicions.

If there was anything odd at all about the party it was the fact that
Kosta, so attentive a few nights earlier at the Greek dance, now kept
his distance.  All through the evening he floated around the room,
talking to this one and that one and staying, it seemed, as far away
from Lisa as possible.

Lisa's fears about Deidre were not realized.  Deidre was at Razzles
with her friend Lori, but did nothing to embarrass Lisa.

The following afternoon, Wednesday, November 1, Lisa was alone in the
Joyland office.  Dina had gone to the bank to make the daily deposit, a
regular Wednesday chore of his because Kosta always took Wednesdays
off.  At around two o'clock there was a knock at the door.

Lisa had been going over repair bills for some of the video games, and
the knock was a welcome distraction from the distressing numbers.

As always she looked first through the peephole of the locked door.

Through it she saw the face of a young black man.  She didn't know him,
but the face did look familiar.  She had it in her head that this was
some acquaintance of Kosta's, perhaps looking for him.  She opened the
door, cautiously pressing a foot against the bottom of it, and holding
it so that it would not open wide, as she normally did when opening the
door to strangers.

The young man was tall and good looking.  He looked to be no more than
twenty.  He had a pleasant smile, but he looked nervous.

Immediately Lisa knew that something was wrong.  It was a hot day, but
the young man was wearing a heavy overcoat.  And then she saw it.

The man had a gun in his right hand.  Lisa froze.  The young man shoved
the gun into her stomach.

"Get inside," he said, "or I'll shoot you."

Lisa stood her ground.  She knew that if she let him into the office,
she might never come out of the office alive.  In various ways she had
envisioned this moment many times, even planned for it.  She often
worked alone in the office, where cash was handled daily.  It had
always seemed to her that the office was the perfect place for a robber
to do his thing.  No windows.  Only one door.  And worse, a victim
could scream bloody murder and no one would ever hear it above the
noise of the video games.  Kosta, aware of the danger, had even given
her a gun for her desk drawer.  Lisa had thought about all these things
and she had always known that if this moment came the gun would not
guarantee her survival.  She simply could not allow herself ever to be
trapped inside the office with an armed robber.  She would be at his
mercy.

All of this flashed through Lisa's mind in an instant.  She even
thought of going for the remote control alarm, but it was at the back
of the office, and if this guy didn't shoot her, it would give him time
to come inside and lock the door.  The gun was pressed against her
ribs.  The young black man was glancing around, telling her to get
inside the office.  She yanked her foot from the door and let it fly
all the way open.  It was like having a cane kicked from .126 under her
and she fell forward to the floor.  The young man jumped back, pointed
the gun at her.

"For a second I just sat there," Lisa remembers.  "My heart was
pounding.  Which way should I run, I wondered, which way should I
run?

To my left was the stairway up to Ocean Avenue.  But to my right, and a
lot closer, was the doorway that led out to the sidewalk next to the
Marriott.  The guy with the gun was shouting at me, "Get up and get in
there."  He was nervous and he kept waving his gun and kind of glancing
around to see if anybody had seen him.  "No,' I shouted at him.  I
jumped up.  "You get in there,' I said, and I ran for the door on my
right.  God, he could shoot me in the back, I thought as I ran down the
sidewalk and behind the Marriott."

But there were no shots, no dashing footsteps behind Lisa.  She ran
until she got to Grecian Corner, the restaurant run by her aunt and
uncle.

"Someone tried to rob me," she told them.  "He had a gun."

From the restaurant she called the police.  When they arrived Lisa
described the incident and the young man who had assaulted her.

"But I left out the part about thinking that the guy was some friend of
Kosta's," she says.  "I wanted to protect Kosta.  I didn't want the
police to think he knew people like that."

Later, when she told Kosta about the robbery attempt, his concern was
very touching.  He held her close and told her everything was all
right.

"Honey," he said.  "You could have been killed."

The phone call that Lisa received in October, and the divorce talk that
followed, did not trigger the plot to kill her.  It only added urgency
to a plan that had already been hatched.  During the latter part of
1989, well before October, literally dozens of people knew, at the very
least, that Deidre Hunt was involved in a plan to murder a woman.

Some, of course, knew who the woman was and who was paying for it.

Many of them were asked to commit the murder, and have since recalled
their part in the drama.

While all of the events certainly took place between July and early
November of 1989, the exact chronology is difficult to come by for a
variety of reasons.  These were not the sort of people to keep
appointment books, or to write everything on a calendar the way Lisa
Fotopoulos did.  Furthermore, many of these people were bombarding
their brains with crack, pot, and alcohol.  And beyond that there is
the simple problem that all of them are accomplished liars and have
various reasons to lie, shade the truth, or leave out facts.  The
result is that clandestine meetings, illegal schemes, and deadly
secrets become, in the words of one boardwalk kid, "a jumble."

Nonetheless, while no one J. R.

report can be viewed as entirely reliable, their combined memories do
add up to the truth.

The motive for the murder was money.  By the summer of 1989 Kosta
Fotopoulos was eighteen thousand dollars in debt.  He had run ten
credit cards up to their limit.  He had invested in Top Shots.  He and
Lisa had bought a duplex in Edgewater, but it was his project and he
was responsible for the mortgage.  Though Lisa didn't know it, one
renter had moved out of the duplex, and the other was stirring Kosta
for the rent.  From his counterfeit money transaction Kosta had
probably netted no more than thirty thousand dollars in real money,
with another twenty thousand or so of funny money still buried in the
woods.  The money he made from stealing cars, running hookers, and
selling drugs didn't seem to be enough to keep up with a lifestyle that
included his BMW, expensive weapons, several girlfriends before Deidre,
and a habit of picking up checks at restaurants.

Furthermore, even before his wife accused him of having an affair,
Kosta must have foreseen the prospect of a divorce.  Lisa had been
unhappy with him ever since the miscarriage and the opening of Top
Shots.  Clearly, if she found out about any of these secret activities,
she would leave him.  And then he would have nothing.

But if Lisa were to die, Kosta figured he then would have everything.

In the long run, if he allowed some time to go by, and then murdered
Dina and Mary, he would have the house, Joyland, the gift shops,
everything that Steno had accumulated.

(In fact, it appears that Kosta had always planned to kill the whole
family, or had at least fantasized about doing it.

But, except for his possible involvement in Steno's death and his
alleged propositions to Bill Markantonakis, we don't know of any
specific actions he took to accomplish this before the summer of 1989.)
In the short run, Kosta believed, he would have seven hundred thousand
dollars in life insurance money.  However, this figure of seven hundred
thousand dollars was incorrect.  It was based on Kosta's belief that
Lisa had a douple indemnity clause in two life insurance policies, and
that the insurance companies would pay double if she were murdered.  In
fact, Lisa's death would have brought in three hundred fifty thousand
dollars from insurance, and half of that would go to Dina.

Nonetheless, seven hundred thousand is the figure that Kosta believed
in and seven hundred thousand is the amount that he and Deidre talked
about when it was agreed that she would help him find someone to kill
his wife, so that they could live together in peace and love.

(Though Kosta knew that Dina would get half of the insurance money, he
talked about the money as if all of it would go to him.) In the summer
and autumn of 1989 at least five people accepted the job of murdering
Lisa Fotopoulos.  The first, of those that are on record, was J. R the
nineteen-year-old burglar from Virginia who became Deidre's first
Daytona boyfriend.  The word on J. R. was "he doesn't give a shit,"
which meant he would do pretty much anything.

Though Deidre didn't care for J. R. at first, it turned out that he
knew the five kids she was living with in a house on North Oleander,
and she saw him when he came over there to drink.  But it wasn't until
she met him at the Ocean Club in the Whitehall Hotel that they hit it
off and started dating.

Deidre hadn't yet started working at Top Shots and what J. R. knew of
Kosta was mostly what he had heard from Kevin Ramsey.  Ramsey worked
for Kosta and seemed to both like and fear the Greek.  Ramsey, who had
recently gotten arrested for buying weed from an undercover cop, told
J. R. that Kosta had bailed him out.  J. R."s own impression of Kosta
at this time was that Kosta "was quiet and seemed like he could be
dangerous."

When Deidre started dating J. R. she moved into the apartment on
Beverly Court where J. R. lived with four other guys.  Sexual fidelity
was foreign to both of them, so J. R.

after a month or so they stopped dating, but J. R. let her stay at the
apartment until she got the room at the Cosa DelMar.

During Deidre's week at the Cosa Del Mar, J. R. and others dropped by
several times to party in the Jacuzzi.

Deidre had money.  She told J. R. she was running cocaine for some
guy.

"Every day she would drop a package off in a bus station locker," he
says.

J. R. says that Deidre also told him that she was running a
prostitution ring for Kosta.

"She said she was like the head of it.  She would call the girls and
tell them where to go to meet people.  She said she ran the chain.

She said Kosta gave her the numbers.

"She talked a lot about guns, too," J. R. says.  "She said that Kosta
was training her and that he was taking her to gun shows in Orlando.

She said he was a master when it came to weapons and that he knew
martial arts."

During this time Deidre told J. R. that Kosta was connected to the
CIA.

She told him also that Kosta wanted him to steal cars.  And it was at
the house on AlA that Kosta first brought up the subject of murder.

"We were just sitting at the table, me and Dee and Kosta.

My friend James was there but he was in the bathroom.

We were having an ordinary conversation when Kosta just sort of
interrupted and said, "I'd like you to do a job for me, for ten
thousand dollars, so I can inherit some money."  He never mentioned no
names.  I said, "Yes' and he didn't say another word.  He just changed
the subject.  Later he gave us all a ride back up to the boardwalk and
dropped us off."

A few days later J. R along with three other guys, spent the night at
Deidre's place.  J. R. and a guy named Ron had been negotiating with
Deidre about stealing three cars for Kosta.  "Ron steals cars," J. R.

explains.  "And Deidre said Kosta wanted three cars stolen in
Florida.

One of them was a Ferrari Testarossa.  Kosta would pay us twenty-five
thousand dollars and give us guns and suits and everything."

After Ron left, Deidre told J. R. that Kosta wanted his wife killed for
ten thousand dollars.

"It was the first time the victim was named," J. R. says.

Again J. R. said he would do it, and Deidre said she would pass the
word along to Kosta.  But again, there was no follow-up.

During this time J. R. says that almost every day Deidre was giving him
money from her Top Shots tips, or money that Kosta had given her to get
her nails done or her hair done.

"I got money all the time.  If I kissed her, I got it.  I got money all
the time, not just when I kissed her or we had sexual intercourse.  She
acted like she cherished the ground I walked on.

Because I treated her like shit, but she liked it, I guess."

The next time the proposed murder came up was a week after Deidre moved
to Schulte Avenue.  J. R. and his new girlfriend, along with a couple
of other kids, were with Deidre, who was thumbing through a gun
magazine.  This time Deidre sang a slightly different tune.  Instead of
asking J. R. to do the murder, she announced that she was to do it.

"She told me and my girlfriend that Kosta wanted her to kill his wife,
and she showed us the gun she was getting," J. R. says.

J. R. was skeptical.  The car theft deal hadn't gone through, the
murder for hire had not been followed up.

J.R. was beginning to think that Kosta was all talk.

Another week went by.  One night, J. R. says, he and his new girlfriend
were at the Schulte Avenue apartment with Shannon and Larry, two more
boardwalk characters.

Deidre told J. R. in front of the others that Kosta still wanted J.

R.

to kill Lisa.

"Now the price was upped to a hundred thousand dollars," J. R.

says.  "She was talking about how much money she had and she said she
was going to get seven hundred and something thousand just for setting
it up.  Then Larry J. R.

and Shannon went into the living room and Deidre said to my girlfriend
and me, "You know, the reason I want to kill people is for the power
and the money."" This last conversation took place in late September,
and according to J. R the murder of Lisa Fotopoulos was not brought up
again until the night before Halloween.

J. R. and Bryan Chase had just gotten back from a trip to Virginia.

They were walking along the boardwalk when Deidre came running up to
them.  She was with Lori Henderson.  Lori, daughter of a Daytona Beach
assistant public defender, was Deidre's female lover, and each girl had
her own male lover.  Lori, eighteen, plain looking and fairly bright,
was dating Teja James, the only black kid in this social circle.

"Deidre said, "Let me talk to you,' "J.  R. recalls.  "So she pulled me
to the side and she said, "Kosta wants you to kill Lisa."

"J.

R. says Deidre also said, "J.  R do you know how it feels to grab
somebody by their head and just blow their brains out?"

"He adds, "She was happy about it.  She expressed it with
excitement."

By this time J. R. had been shot at by Kosta in the closet of Deidre's
apartment, and he had been warned by Kosta to stay away from Deidre and
to stay out of Top Shots.  So the possibility of a Kosta double cross
was certainly on his mind.  But J. R. was a guy who "didn't give a
shit," and chances are he would have signed on for the murder if it
hadn't been for Lori Henderson.

That night J. R Deidre, and Lori stood out on the boardwalk in front of
Pizza King while Deidre outlined the plan to murder Lisa Fotopoulos.

Lori was silent throughout, then suddenly she said, "No."

"I knew something was going on when Lori said, "No,' just out of the
blue," J. R. says.  "She said, "No, not him."  I picked that up as
meaning that something was going to happen to me.  Dee said to Lori,
"That's all right,' and Lori walked away.  She got some cigarettes and
came back."

Of course, only J. R. knows for sure whether or not he would have gone
through with the murder of Lisa.  He says that he would never take a
person's life, that he just went along with all this, thinking it was a
joke.  But he also says that it was Lori's, "No, not him," that
persuaded him to bail out, a seemingly contradictory statement.  More
likely, J. R. just saw that he was involved in something that could
lead to money, either through a murder, or perhaps a ripoff of Kosta,
and just played along day by day without a clear picture of what he
would do.  In any case, J. R. agreed to meet Kosta at Popeye's chicken
restaurant to discuss the murder, but J. R. did not show up.  Weeks
later he talked to Lori about her warning.

"She told me she was there when Kosta and Deidre had the conversation
and that whoever came into the house was going to die, and she didn't
want me to be the one," he says.  "She wanted it to be somebody she
didn't know very well."

During the time that J. R. was being courted for the murder of Lisa
Fotopoulos others were being interviewed for the same job.  One of them
was Gus Moamis, the twenty-four-year-old car thief who says he came in
on Kosta and Deidre when they were watching the torture film.

On September 12, 1989, Moamis was released from the Volusia County
Branch Jail, where he had been serving short time for breaking into
motels.  From the jail, located west of town out on Volusia, Moamis
hitched a ride to the boardwalk, where he looked up his old jail pal,
Kevin Ramsey.  Ramsey, eighteen, was working behind the bar at Top
Shots.

Moamis soon fell in with the Top Shots crowdDeidre Hunt, Lori
Henderson, Ramsey, Mike Cox, Ron the car thief, Teja James, J. R and
assorted underage hookers.

Moamis was one of several wayward young people who sometimes sacked out
at Deidre's place.

In fact, as Moamis tells it, on his first visit to Deidre's, after a
game of football with the others, he accidently climbed into the shower
with Deidre, where he says there was "a little sexual contact, but no
intercourse."  Moamis does claim to have had sex with Deidre on other
occasions, which would make him less than unique.  Many of the people
in this group, male and female, slept with Deidre at one time or
another.

It was at Top Shots that Moamis met Kosta.

"At first I thought he was a cop," Moamis says.  "He asked me something
and I said, "Man, I don't want to talk to you, you are a cop.

I don't want to talk to cops,' and he said, "I am not a cop,' and the
conversation went on a little bit, and about half an hour after we
stopped talking, Deidre came over to me and she said Kosta wants to
talk to me at the bar."

Gus Moamis, it should be noted, has never been considered a highly
reliable witness to the events of 1989.  David Damore, an assistant
state attorney for the seventh Judicial District, says of Moamis, "I
think he tells you some truth and then he adds his own details for
effect."

As Moamis tells it, Kosta met Moamis at the bar, bought him a drink,
and asked him what he had been in jail for and how old he was.

Moamis clammed up.

"So you think I'm a cop?"  Kosta said.

"Yeah," Moamis told him.  "I seen you talking to the cops outside your
place."

Then Kosta asked, "What would it take for me to prove to you that I'm
not a cop?"

"I don't know," Moamis said.

Kosta paused.  "I want you to do something for me," he said.

The two men walked into the office at the back of Top Shots and, as
Moamis tells it, Kosta laid ten one-hundreddollar bills on the desk.

"I want you to get a car," he said to Moamis, who was an experienced
car thief.  He described the car, a Chevrolet Z-28.

"He told me where it would be parked," Moamis says.

"The keys would be in it.  Go down there, pick the car up and bring it
back to him.  That's how I actually got involved with the whole
deal."

This car theft that Kosta hired Moamis for is known as an "insurance
job."  It's a common scam in which the car keys are left in the
ignition by an owner who has paid to have his car stolen so he can
collect the insurance money.

According to Moamis, there were eight or nine such insurance jobs that
he did for Kosta.  He or his partner would steal the car, keep it for
two days, then blow it up or set it on fire.

"There were times, two times that I can remember, where a person
actually come in and sat and talked to Kosta in the office and he
pulled me in the office and said, "Well, you are going to go here this
time and get this car."  There was one car, a red Vette, from the
airport parking lot.  We blew it up in Boca Raton."

According to Moamis, car theft was not the only crime Kosta put him up
to.  Later on that first night, Moamis says, Deidre Hunt asked him and
four other boardwalk characters if they wanted to make some quick
money.

"She said she knew where there was some money at and we went and robbed
a motel room.  We got a couple of movie cameras out of it, a Rolex
watch, a small amount of money, and some jewelry."

Moamis says that Kosta knew where certain guests were staying at
various Daytona Beach motels and what they had in their rooms.

He says, "you can go in some hotels after midnight and 1reach behind
the counter and they have numbers of all the rooms, all of the keys are
sitting right there.  Kosta would say, "You get room two oh two."  It
would be that simple.

Go rob the room and bring the shit back to him.  He would sell the shit
to a couple of people that came down there and bought small things,
small necklaces and bracelets and stuff like that.  Sometimes it was
set up so that the key would be there, buried next to the fifth or
sixth tree, or by the trash can, or whatever."

Moamis also says Kosta was running prostitutes out of Daytona Beach
hotels and was working a two-for-one deal where he would give two
one-hundred-dollar bills to kids on the boardwalk and tell them to
bring him back four hundred.  The kids, according to Moamis, would use
the two hundred to buy drugs, then resell the drugs for enough profit
to pay back Kosta and still make some.

Cocaine selling was, according to Moamis, another of Kosta's illegal
activities.

"If Deidre was behind the counter and somebody come in and wanted a
gram of coke, they would get ahold of somebody in the bar, you know,
has anybody got any coke, go tell Deidre.  Deidre would go get it from
Kosta.

Deidre would bring it to whoever and sell it to them.  The second day
out I bought a gram from them.  It was always there."

Gus Moamis, a Greek-American, sensed, as did J. R that Kosta was
dangerous.  "He was quite violent," Moamis says.  "He was the kind that
he could do anything at any time.  He told me a story one time, though
I took it as a joke, about a person that he killed somewhere in some
river.  He cemented their feet in a tool box and dropped them off in
some lake and videotaped them drowning.  He threw them over the boat
and he had on some stuff and went in the water and taped them
drowning.

I don't know if he got that out of a book or what."

On September 16, as Gus Moamis tells it, he went into the Top Shots
bar.

"Deidre was working behind the bar.  It was about nine o'clock at night
and I came in and she said, "Kosta wants to talk to you."  I said,
"Okay, fine."  I went in the back.  He said, "Have a seat,' went out
and got us a couple of beers and we were sitting there talking and he
got real serious and he asked me if I would ever kill anybody and I
said, "I don't know, if the money was right."  It wasn't in a joking
manner.

"He leaned across the desk and said, "How much would it cost for you to
kill somebody?"

"I said, "I ain't got no idea."

"He took a briefcase from the floor next to the desk and put it on the
table.  He opened it up and said, "There is seventy-five thousand
dollars in there."  There were little stacks of thousands lined up all
the way across the briefcase.

"I said, "You're serious, ain't you?"  He said, "Yes."

"We sat there and talked a little more and I kept asking who it was and
he wouldn't tell me.  I said, "Somebody here, guy, girl, or what?"  and
he wouldn't tell me.  He asked me again how much it would cost for me
to kill somebody.  He said, "I want to give you a little time to think
about it before we discuss who it is.  If you want to do it, the money
is here.  You get half the money before and half afterward."

"We discussed a few ways I could do it, take them somewhere out in the
woods and kill them, and he asked me, "How would you do it?"

"Before I left, Kosta paid me thirty-five hundred dollars he owed me
for a couple of cars that were stolen earlier that day."

Moamis says he thought seriously about doing the job.

"Yes, I thought about it.  Who wouldn't with seventy-five thousand
dollars looking you in the face?  If I had a gun right there, he
wouldn't have had the money no more the way I looked at it.

"I spent that night at Dee's and I come out of the bathroom and she was
lying in bed and she asked me if Kosta talked to me and I said,
"Yes."

And she said, "Did you tell him yes or no."  Then it dawned on me what
she was talking about and I asked her, I said, "Do you know about
this?"  and she's the one that told me it was Lisa.  The next day I got
arrested, so nothing really ever happened after that."

If Moamis had taken the job, he says, he probably would have killed
Kosta, too.

"It was plain right from the start that whoever killed Lisa was going
to be killed, bottom line.  I wouldn't have walked in the house and
shot the lady of the house first and leave the guy sitting there,
especially when I know he loved guns."

But Moamis also says, "I am not the kind of guy that can just go kill
somebody, especially when I found out that it was Lisa.  That shocked
me.  I know Lisa from talking to her at the bar and at Joyland, but I
don't know her real well.  She seems like a super nice girl to me."

Mike The third person to bail out of the Lisa Fotopoulos murder plan
was Matthew Chumbley, who was known on the boardwalk as Mike Cox, a
name he had invented.  "I used it," he says, "whenever I was beating
people."

"Beating" people in the lexicon of Mike Cox does not mean hitting
them.

It means taking money from them by selling them real or bogus LSD,
conning them, stealing from them, doing whatever it takes.  Most of the
money Mike stole went to feed a serious drug monkey that had been on
his back since early childhood.

Mike, who would discover Christ after all of this was over, had spent
much of his youth at juvenile camps.  In his home state of Kentucky he
had been arrested for marijuana possession and carrying a concealed
weapon.  For that he had done "like forty-two hours or something," he
says.  In early September of 1989 he hitchhiked to Daytona Beach with a
friend.

Mike and his friend migrated from motel to motel on the beach before
moving into a small apartment where they rented a mattress on the floor
for twenty dollars a week from a guy who worked on the boardwalk.

After their host got thrown out of his place for selling crack, Cox
descended to the streets, where he slept in abandoned motels and smoked
a lot of crack.

At Top Shots he met Deidre, and through Deidre he met Kosta Fotopoulos,
whom he regarded as a formidable personality.

"I was not afraid of Kosta, personally," he says.  "I was afraid of the
power he had."

Mike's first business transaction with Kosta was to be a gun purchase,
but the deal fell through.  It had begun when a friend told Cox that he
needed some protection during drug deals.  Cox suggested to his friend
that Cox and J. R.

get machine guns and go along as armed escorts on the drug sales.

The friend thought that was a fine idea.  Cox asked around on the
boardwalk.  The question was: who do you go to for guns?  The answer
was: Kosta.

"I was trying to buy two Uzis," Mike Cox says, "and Kosta told me it
would cost me, I think, eight thousand dollars or something like
that.

I'm not sure of the price.

But he told me he could have them for me in an hour with silencers and
all the ammunition I needed."

The deal collapsed because the price was too high, but the negotiations
had planted Mike Cox in Kosta's mind as one more young man who would do
illegal things for money.

"Kosta always called me the Assassin after that," Mike says.  "I didn't
like that.  You know, "Hey, Mr. Assassin."  That's what he called me
every time he seen me."

Sometime in October Kosta told Deidre to feel out Mike Cox for the job
of murdering Lisa.  Deidre found Cox and asked him if he would like to
make ten thousand dollars.

"When she asked me did I want to make ten thousand dollars, I thought
she was was joking.  I said, "Who do I got to kill?"  And she said,
"Somebody."  And I said, "Who?"  And she said, "Well, it might be a
woman.  I can't tell you right now."  And then she said, "I have to
talk to somebody."" bike At nine o'clock on Thursday, October 26, Mike
Cox met Deidre at G.

B. Reef's bar, just a few blocks north of the Marriott.  His memory of
what occurred that night is consistent with Deidre's.

Cox says that he did not trust Deidre and did not find her
attractive.

(Though he does proudly recall joining a sex orgy with Lori: "She was
giving Buck' head, and Tiger was eating Lori, and I was behind Tiger.")
He does remember that things were pretty lively at the bar that
night.

Some of the guys at the bar were having a beer bust.

Pay a dollar and get all the draft beer you can drink until somebody
gets up to take a piss, then the beer bust is over.

The murder Mike was being hired for, Deidre said, was to be carried out
in an office.  (When J. R. and Gus Moamis were approached about
murdering Lisa they were told the murder would take place in the
victim's house.) "You've got to go into this place, knock on the door
to the office and ask for somebody," Deidre told Mike that night at the
crowded bar.

"Who?"

"I can't tell you who, not yet.  You'll be let in the door.

Just shoot the woman.  There's a bathroom in the office.

Somebody will come out of the bathroom and give you the ten
thousand."

"No way," Mike told her.  "I want to see the money first."

Deidre thought about it.  "Okay, I can arrange to have it out on the
desk."

The details were still vague to Cox.  But Deidre was drinking, and as
she drank, Cox pestered her for more information.

"It's a lady who's trying to blackmail Kosta," she finally told him.

"Who's going to be coming out of the bathroom?  Kosta?"

Mike asked.

"Yes," she told him.  "And you've got to shoot him, too, in the
shoulder."

Deidre assured Cox that he would get his ten thousand dollars, and he
told her he would do the job.  Deidre told him to meet her at Top Shots
the following afternoon, Friday, at two o'clock.  She would set the
whole thing up for him and give him a gun.

"And a silencer," Mike said.  "I want a silencer."

"I can't," Deidre told him.  "It would be too hard to dig it up."

"Dig it up?"

"The silencers are buried in the woods with other guns," she
explained.

With that settled, Deidre, now almost drunk, began to shoot her mouth
off about the Hunters and Killers Club.

She made it sound to Cox as if the H and K Club was her and Kosta's
organization, but was somehow linked to the Mafia and other organized
crime.  She told Mike about the videotape requirement, said that there
was a videotape of her doing a murder and that she had a videotape of
someone else committing a murder.

"Do you want to see it?"  she asked.

"No," Mike said.

"If you're interested in joining you could make ten thousand dollars a
week," she told Cox.  She told him she had a Swiss bank account with
over half a million dollars in it that Kosta had put there.  Cox liked
what he heard.  It sounded glamorous.

"Besides," she told Mike, "if you ever get caught you'll only get three
years at the most."

"Three years?"

"It's all political," Deidre explained.  "There's lots of high up
people involved.  It's all got to do with politics."

At one point Deidre started talking about the murder again and she said
something that troubled and confused Cox.  She told him that it was
okay for him to kill the person who came out of the bathroom.

Cox says now, "It messed my brain up.  I was like, what the hell's
going on.  I guess she didn't realize she had told me it was going to
be Kosta coming out of the bathroom."

Though Mike Cox didn't catch on at the time, the plan, of course, was
for Kosta to kill Mike.  Specifically, Kosta would hear shots, come out
of the bathroom, discover that some lowlife had shot his darling wife
to death and he, Kosta, would shoot the hoodlum to death.  This is more
or less what would have happened to J. R. or Gus Moamis if they had
gone through with the murder.  "Kosta liked people who were
expendable," Deidre says.

Like J. R. and Gus Moarnis, Mike Cox gave serious thought to committing
the murder.  However, like those two, he was to be plucked from harm's
way.  On the morning after his meeting with Deidre at G. B.

Reef's, Mike Cox was arrested for trespassing and was safely locked up
in the Volusia County Branch Jail.

Deidre would have to kill somebody.  That's what Kosta told her.

If she wanted to be a member of the Hunters and Killers Club, she would
have to kill.  Furthermore, she would have to let Kosta videotape the
murder.

All of this was explained to her certainly by early October 1989, when
Deidre was recruiting potential murderers.  As each new murder
conspiracy unraveled, it became more and more clear that Deidre herself
might have to murder her lover's wife.  If that was to be the case, she
would first have to prove that her heart was as cold as his.  He told
her she would have to show him that she was capable of murder.

Lori Henderson recalls, "One day Deidre was telling me about Kosta
wanting to have his wife killed, and then all of a sudden she started
saying, "He's going to have me kill someone to make sure that I can do
it, to prove to him that I can kill his wife."  Deidre wasn't really
decided on who she would kill.  She thought Kosta was in love with her
and they were just going to be happy together after his wife was
gone.

"Kosta gave Deidre a Beretta.  [Note: others recall that h,;1l Deidre
was supposed to get a beret, so it is not clear whether Kosta gave her
a cap or a pistol in this instance.] She was supposed to get an H and K
on it or something like that, once she had completed everything.  She
was supposed to kill someone so she could take responsibility for
killing Lisa."

The person Kosta picked for Deidre's initiation into murder was Kevin
Ramsey.

Kevin Ramsey grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, in three different
homes, his mother's, his father's, and his grandmother's.

His parents say he was a good kid, but easily persuaded into
mischief.

His father, Terry, an electrician in Wilmington, recalls, "Kevin always
went along with the crowd, he was easily led.  As a teenager he went
joyriding one time in another kid's car with three other kids.

The judge made him do community work, put him on probation, and told
him to stay in school.  But he was a good kid, never a violent kid.

He wasn't big, but he was strong and he would wrassle with other kids,
but he would never hurt them."

Kevin liked to play basketball and he liked to draw cartoons.

"Could really get the details down on cars and motorcycles," his father
says.

Kevin quit high school in his sophomore year when he was sixteen.

"Got involved with a girl and moved in with her," his father says.

He later broke up with the girl and tried his hand at a variety of
jobs, but when he got restless, the idea of going to Florida took hold
of his imagination, and nobody could shake it loose.  His mother, Vicki
McLamb, recalls, "He said there had to be more opportunities in places
other than Wilmington.  We begged him not to go.  He just wouldn't
listen."

Kevin was a jolly kid, his mother says, always clowning around.

He loved to joke, laugh, and run after girls.

"Yet," she says, "he was very sensitive."  He often wrote poetry.

Shortly before he left for Florida Kevin wrote a sadly prophetic poem
and gave it to his sister, Tania.

To those whom I love, if I should ever leave you whom I love to go the
silent way, Grieve not nor speak of me with tears.

But laugh and talk with me as if I was beside you there.  .

When Kevin first got to Daytona he was arrested in a stolen car, but
later released.  Like other aimless kids, he gravitated to the
boardwalk.  He called his mother periodically to tell her he was
okay.

He lived for a while in the same group as J. R. In fact, he and J.

R.

were good friends until Kevin, then eighteen, got a job as a bartender
at Top Shots.  "Then," says J. R "he got too big for his britches."

Vinnie Speziale, who was Kevin's boss at Top Shots, says, "Kevin, aside
from the fact of what I would classify as being a punk, was a decent
kid.  By that I mean he would help you out with anything you needed.

If you needed the trash emptied, you know, with no remuneration he'd do
that.  We had an instance where our beer cooler went out, and this kid
lugs these huge cooler things all the way up to the end of the pier,
upstairs to be stored.  You know, just things like that.

"He seemed to be a messed-up kid, you know.  He looked up to Kosta like
a father or a brother.  He worshipped Kosta.  He worshipped the ground
Kosta walked on.  Kosta confided in Kevin more than he did in me.  They
were very close.  Maybe he confided in him too much."

J. R. also remembers that Kevin looked up to Kosta.

"Kevin always talked good about Kosta," says J. R "about Kosta always
giving him money and stuff.  Kosta bonded him out of jail one time when
Kevin sold weed to an undercover cop and was arrested.  Kevin liked
Kosta, and he feared him.  He was always like, "Don't do this, Kosta
will get mad."  He appeared to be in awe of him."

Not surprisingly, Kevin's image on the boardwalk was at some variance
with the one of the sensitive, poetic teenager that the folks back home
in North Carolina recall.

Though he worked hard at his Top Shots job Kevin also, it seems, was
constantly on the lookout for a fast buck.

Gus Moamis, for example, says Kevin Ramsey was running prostitutes.

Others say Kevin was selling acid.  And, though his parents say Kevin
was incapable of violence, Mike Cox says, "I knew Kevin was robbing
people on the beach at night.  He told me he would hide up against a
wall and lay down and wait for people to walk by and jump up and beat
the shit out of them with a two-by-four or something and rob them."

Kevin Ramsey was a poet.  And he was also a hustler.

And it was his hustling that got him in trouble with the local
psycho.

When Kosta Fotopoulos decided that Kevin Ramsey would be the person
Deidre would kill, it was not a random choice.  Though Kevin might have
adored Kosta at one time, through the fall of 1989 there were steady
signs that the relationship was deteriorating.

For one thing, Kevin stole money from the man he looked up to.

"Kevin was stealing from the business," says Speziale.

"I brought it up right in front of him and Kosta.  He said, "I swear to
God, I never took a penny out of that register."  I said, "The
goddamned money never made it to the register, did it, Kevin?"  And he
goes, "No, it didn't."  I mean he didn't take it out of the register.

It never made it to the register.  So, he admitted to the stealing."

Kosta fired Kevin and told him never to enter Top Shots again.

When Kevin stole from Top Shots he had betrayed the Greek, but that,
apparently, was not enough to earn him a death sentence.  Even after
the firing, Kevin and Kosta seemed to get along well.  But when Kevin
betrayed Kosta a second time, by running prostitutes of his own, Kosta
started with the death threats.

Gus Moamis says, "I personally on two occasions seen Kosta threaten to
kill Kevin if he didn't stop running prostitutes, because Kosta was
losing money.  His girls were going from Kosta to Kevin and he told
Kevin, you know, if you don't stop it I will kill you.  He was serious,
too."

However, it was probably neither the stealing nor the pimping that
sealed Kevin's fate.  Kevin was marked for death because he was
planning to blackmail Kosta, and he made the mistake of telling Deidre
Hunt about it, which was roughly akin to broadcasting it on Daytona's
largest radio station.

Kevin's boardwalk friend Teja James, recalls, "After Kevin found out
that Kosta was passing counterfeit money, he said he was going to
blackmail him.  He asked me did I know anything else about Kosta.  I
was like, "Well, dude, that's out of my league, you know.  I don't want
to be involved with it."  He just said he wanted a couple thousand
dollars off Kosta or he was going to go to the police.  I don't think
he ever told Kosta that.  But he told Deidre.  I'm pretty sure she told
Kosta."

That's a pretty safe assumption.  Later, when Deidre found out that
Kevin was to be her victim she told her friend and lover, Lori
Henderson.

It was the night of October 20, five nights before Lisa would get her
dreadful phone call from Elena Speziale.

Deidre spoke to Lori while Deidre waited on the boardwalk for Kevin and
Kosta.

"Deidre told me that it was going to be Kevin," Lori says.  "She told
me that Kosta had set it up with him, that he was supposed to meet him
down at Joyland to talk about getting his job back or something, and
Deidre was waiting on him to get there.  She told me that Kosta had
picked Kevin to be the victim and that they were going to meet him on
the boardwalk.  Deidre wanted to kill Kevin.

She wanted to find out if she could kill someone.  I didn't freiin
think she was capable of it, but Kosta, yes.  Deidre was afraid Kevin
wouldn't show up.  Then kind of jokingly she asked if he doesn't show
up, then, you know, who should she kill or something like that.  She
said if Kevin didn't show up she would take Tiger into the woods.

Tiger is the girl down on the boardwalk, a little sixteen-year-old
girl.  It was just joking."

It's incredible that Kevin Ramsey walked so willingly into this trap,
because clearly in the days preceding it he believed that his life was
in danger.

Robin Bergdorf, a twenty-three-year-old nurse's aid who was one of
Kevin Ramsey's girlfriends in Daytona, recalls that when Kevin was
living with her in her trailer on Ridgewood Avenue he came home drunk
on the night of October 18 and said he was afraid he was going to be
killed or badly hurt because he had learned too much about Kosta's
business.

"I said, "You ain't got nothing to be afraid of,' "Bergdorf says.

"Then he said that he was afraid because of something that he had done
with Kosta Fotopoulos or knew about him.  Supposedly, he was selling
drugs for him.  This was after he stopped working in Top Shots.

He said he learned too much while he was working for Konstantin.

"I took it he was quite afraid when he started crying.  He cried
through the whole conversation and afterward for about an hour."

For the next two days, Bergdorf says, Kevin was his normal self.

And then he disappeared.

Kevin had not, however, skipped town, though that would seem a prudent
thing to do under the circumstances.  There is no saying why Ramsey
didn't just run away from Daytona.  But one reasonable explanation is
that Kosta had found out where Kevin's relatives lived and had
threatened to kill them if Kevin left town.

Kevin also turned to Raymond Smith, a security guard who was sometimes
assigned to the Krystal's hamburger joint, one block east of the
boardwalk, where many of the boardwalk kids hung out.

"Kevin didn't seem like the kind of kid who was in big trouble," Smith
says.  "Seemed like he'd been pretty much on his own for a long time.

He asked for my phone number once when I was working.  He told me
thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls were going in the pool hall and
he thought there was something sexual going on and it had something to
do with Fotopoulos.  He was concerned.  He wanted me to investigate.

I told him I'm not a police officer, I can't investigate."

One night in mid-October Smith was at home when Kevin called.

"Hey, Ray, this is Kevin."

Ramsey sounded excited.  "What's up?"  Smith asked.

"I'm scared," Kevin told him.

"Scared about what?"

"I don't want to talk about it on the phone."

"Well, give me an idea," Ray said.  "What are you scared about?"

"Somebody's after me," Kevin told him.

"How do you know?"

"I just .  . . think somebody is after me," Kevin said.  He sounded
spacey.  He wasn't making much sense.

Kevin asked Smith to meet him.

"So we agreed to meet at Krystal's," Smith says.  "It was nine-thirty
at night.  I'm sitting there and this blue Mercedes with tinted windows
pulls up.  Kevin gets out of the passenger side.  He comes in.  He was
really petrified that somebody was after him.

"Someone's after me, someone wants to kill me,' he says.  I said, "Like
in a movie?"  He said, "No, I'm serious."  I was surprised because
Kevin was the type of guy, nothing would scare him.  He didn't tell me
who would try to kill him.  He said it had something to do with the
pool hall.  "Well, how did you find this out?"  I asked him.

"Somebody told me,' he says.

"He wanted a bodyguard.  I said I can do it but I've got Red to go
through the office and it will cost money.  He said he'd call me.

"He had me confused.  This didn't make any sense.  I said, "Whose car
is that?"  and he said it was his dad's, which was hard to believe.

I had never seen him in a vehicle before, he was always on foot.

The car was like silver blue, with dark purple tinted windows so you
couldn't see in, nice wheels.  I said, "You're moving up in the
world."

"I asked him why someone wanted to kill him.  He said he didn't know,
he would talk to me later.  He looked like he was really in a rush to
get out of there.  He got back in the car on the passenger side.  I
couldn't see who was driving."

The Mercedes and its driver remain a mystery, as does Kevin's reasons
for staying in Daytona when he was so certain that someone wanted to
kill him.

Equally mysterious is Kevin Ramsey's love life.  While Robin Bergdorf
describes herself as "a very close girlfriend" to Kevin, and says he
was living with her up to the time he disappeared, Diane Nelson,
another girl who hangs out on the boardwalk, and says Kevin was "like a
brother" to her, tells a different story.  "Tiger and Kevin were
supposed to get married in about three months," Diane says.  "They
broke up, but they didn't really break up.  They were playing some kind
of scam where he was going with some girl to get her money and after
getting her money he would pick up with Tiger again.  Tiger was a
prostitute."

Add to this a third girlfriend, Diamond.  After Kevin vanished, it was
Diamond, according to several of the boardwalk kids, who put out a
story that Kevin had gone to work for her father in Orlando, and then
had stolen a truck and split.  Some believe that Diamond was paid to
spread this story.  But that seems unlikely.  What would be the point
of paying someone to spread a cover story when Kevin's killer was
proudly telling half the county about how she killed Kevin?

What follows is a description of Kevin Ramsey's murder, based on the
confession Deidre Hunt gave to the police, and the recollections of the
people to whom Deidre described the murder before she was arrested.

On that Friday night, October 20th, Deidre finally met Kevin at
Popeye's, a franchised fried chicken restaurant.

Kevin knew he was to meet Kosta there and he was not afraid.

Kosta had told Kevin that all was forgiven and that Kevin would be
initiated into the Hunters and Killers Club.

When Kosta arrived, the three of them got into Kosta's car and drove
west toward the wooded area along Williamson Boulevard, not far from
the Strickland shooting range, where Kosta often practiced.  Along the
way Kosta explained the night's initiation.  They would go into the
woods and he would shoot at Kevin's feet.  Kevin would have to remain
perfectly still.  This would somehow show that Kevin was qualified to
go into Europe to do hits and face enemy fire.

Kosta also explained that when Kevin went to Europe to commit these
high-priced murders, he would be given a Russian rifle.  "That's what
the terrorists use," Kosta explained.  "That way when they find the
bullets they'll think it was a terrorist, not just some guy who came
into the country to do a hit."

Perhaps there is no better example of how persuasive and charming Kosta
Fotopoulos could be than the simple fact that Kevin Ramsey felt safe
enough to go into the woods at night and stand by a tree and let Kosta
point a gun at him and fire it, simply because Kosta assured him that
he was no longer interested in killing Kevin.

When they got to Williamson Kosta pulled over.  From the trunk of his
BMW he removed an AK47 automatic rifle, an eight-millimeter video
camera, a flashlight, and a .22 caliber pistol with a silencer.  The
trio walked into the woods.

When they were far enough from the road, which was virtually untraveled
at this hour, Kosta handed the .22 to Deidre.  He pulled out some
rope.

"He tied Kevin to a tree," Deidre says.  "He said, "Kevin, this is just
a precaution so you don't move, because you freiin don't want to get
hit."  Kevin's hands were behind his back around the tree and Kosta
tied his hands together.  Kosta walked to the left.  He took out the
video camera and pointed at me and he said take the .22 and shoot
him.

I shot Kevin three times in the chest and once in the head, in the left
temple at close range.  Then after that Kosta shot him again with some
kind of Russian gun.  He had it on semiautomatic I guess because it
only shot one bullet when he pulled the trigger.  He made me catch the
shell.  He untied Kevin and took the rope, so Kevin's body was like
scrunched.  He said, "Sorry, man,' and he said, "Come on, so I just
followed him.  We went back to the car and left."

The preceding quotes from Deidre Hunt are taken from the confession she
gave to police after she was arrested.

They are the parts of the confession that are consistent with the
recollections of Lori Henderson, Teja James, and others to whom Deidre
described the murder before she was arrested.  The full confession to
the police contains many self-serving details, which the others don't
recall hearing when Deidre was not in custody, and which must be
considered suspect.

For example, in her confession Deidre says of the .22, "I don't know
why he gave it to me.  He said "Carry this,' and I did what he said."

And after Kosta told her to shoot Kevin, Deidre says, "I didn't know
what to do.  I was scared by this point and he could just as easily
have shot me.  Of the video camera, Deidre says, "I didn't know it was
a video camera until afterward.  I just thought it was a flashlight he
had."

Deidre's story in a nutshell is that Kosta forced her at gunpoint to
kill Kevin and that, furthermore, he threatened to kill her family if
she didn't do as told.  It's likely that Kosta threatened Deidre's
family.  That was one of his ploys.  But the idea that Deidre killed
Kevin strictly out of self-preservation is at odds with every other
story surrounding the events of those troubling days, and with her
demeanor on the videotape.

With any murder there will be discrepancies large and small between
stories told by comurderers, and between different versions told by one
murderer.  But the basic facts of Kevin Ramsey's murder cannot be
refuted because, uniquely, they were captured on videotape.

The videotape that Kosta made that night is fifty-seven seconds long.

It begins with Deidre Hunt standing in the dark woods with only the
light of Kosta's flashlight on her.

She looks at the camera and tells Kosta, "Don't shine it in my eyes.

Hold it down."  Then she says, "Ready?"

We hear Kosta say, "Come closer.  I can't see you."

Kosta, apparently, points to where Deidre should stand.

"Stand right there," he says.  Deidre moves closer to Kevin, who is
tied to the tree.  The camera pans to the face of Kevin Ramsey and then
back to Deidre.  Again she says, "Ready?"  Kosta says, "Okay."

Then Deidre lifts the gun and points it at Kevin Ramsey's chest.

She fires three times into the left side of his chest.  Kevin moans in
pain.  He says, "God."  Then he makes another sound of agony, like,
"Ahhh," and he lifts his left leg in pain.  His head is down now.

Diedre walks over to him.  She grabs his hair and pulls his head up.

She puts the gun to his left temple and fires once more.  Kevin falls
forward.  We can see that his hands are tied behind him with a rope.

The video ends.

After Kosta shut off the video camera that night he picked up his AK47
and shot Kevin one more time.

Lori Henderson recalls, "Deidre told me they had tied him to a tree or
something and shot him a couple of times in the body and then she told
me that she picked up his head and she shot him one time in his head,
and then she had to hold a jacket to catch the shell because Kosta said
something about Kevin not being all the way dead or something and so he
shot Kevin with a big gun.  She told me he had videotaped it."

After Kevin was dead, Deidre Hunt did not act as if she had done
something to be ashamed of.  Her descriptions of the murder to friends
have about them the quality of a Keirn boast.  She had, it seems, done
something of which she was proud.

During the days following that night in the woods off Williamson
Boulevard Deidre told at least four people about the murder, and
probably more.  She told Lori Henderson.  She told Mike Cox.  She told
J. R. And she told Kevin's friend and Lori's boyfriend, Teja James.

She told Teja because after J. R. had turned her down and Mike Cox got
arrested, there was still the matter of Lisa Fotopoulos to be dealt
with.  Kosta wanted his wife dead and, as much as she had enjoyed
killing Kevin, Deidre did not want the job of killing Lisa.  She wanted
Teja to do it.

Teja, twenty-one, had lived in Daytona off and on, and now had been
down from Brooklyn since June, long enough for him to have fallen in
with Kosta and the kids who hung out at Top Shots.  Of all those kids,
he was closest to Lori, who was his girlfriend, and Kevin Ramsey, who
was his drinking pal.

Sometime during the last week of October Teja recalls being in Deidre
Hunt's apartment on Lenox.  He sat on the bed with Deidre in her
bedroom.  Lori was in another room.

"Do you remember what I told you and Kevin that time?"  Deidre said,
referring to one of the many times she had shot her mouth off about
Kosta's various rackets.

"About the counterfeit?"  Teja asked.

"Right," Deidre said.  "The counterfeit.  And you remember that Kevin
was going to blackmail Kosta."

"Yeah," Teja said, "I remember him talking about it."

He remembered Kevin trying to find out if Teja knew other things about
Kosta.

"Have you seen Kevin around lately?"  Deidre said.  She smiled.

"Come to think of it, no," Teja said.  "Kevin hasn't even been in town
lately."

"No, he hasn't," Deidre said knowingly.

"I wonder where he went.  His girlfriend told me he was in Orlando."

"He's not in Orlando," Deidre said.  "He's in Daytona."

"Daytona?  Where?"

"He's dead," Deidre said.

"Right," Teja said.  "Sure he is."

"I'm not kidding," Deidre said.  "He's dead.  I killed him."

"Yeah, right, Deidre.  Right," Teja said.

"I'll show you," Deidre said.

Teja watched as Deidre climbed off the bed and walked to her closet.

What she was telling him was ridiculous, but she didn't look as if she
were joking.

"Yeah, right," he said again, nervously.  "Kevin's dead.

Sure."

Deidre came back to the bed carrying a pair of her shoes.

"See," she said.  She thrust the shoes forward with one hand and
pointed to the red crusted stains on them.

"That's his blood."

Teja could feel himself getting tense.  His heart was beating faster.

He was starting to believe this shit.

"Oh, come on," Teja said.  "This is a joke, right?"

"No joke," Deidre said.

"It's got to be," he said.  "Tell me it's a joke."

Then Deidre called Lori into the room.

"Lori," Deidre said, "tell Teja that Kevin's dead."

Lori looked at her boyfriend.

"Well?"  he said.

"He's dead," Lori said.

Teja knew Lori well enough to realize this was no joke.

He was shocked.

"But why?"  he said.  "How?"

Deidre and Lori sat on the bed like two girls at a pajama party and
told Teja how Deidre and Kosta had killed Kevin Ramsey and why it was
videotaped.

"Deidre told me how they went about it," Teja says now.

"Told me where the body was, how many times he was shot, what he was
shot with, what he had on, what he said, the last thing he said, and
that the only thing they regretted about it was that his last
spoken words, before they turned on the video camera, were "I'm
hungry."  I was pretty pissed off about it.  Kevin was my friend."

Perhaps the thing that shocked Teja most that day was the fact that his
girlfriend knew about the murder in advance.  In fact, on the night of
the 20th, while Kevin was being tied to the tree, Lori was at Top Shots
with Teja, knowing what was going on.

"The whole time Lori was sitting with me at Top Shots, saying that she
was waiting to go meet Deidre at a bar, was when it happened," Teja
says.

When the girls finished telling their tale in Deidre's bedroom that
day, Teja was numb.  Kevin dead?  It was hard to imagine.  And then
Deidre began her pitch.

"He's coming to talk to you next, you know," Deidre said.

"Who?"

"Kosta."

"Kosta?"  Teja said.  The name itself had begun to sound frightening.

"What are you going to do?"  Deidre asked.  "He's going to ask you to
work for him."

"Or?"  Teja asked.

"Or, you know, end up like Kevin," she said.

Teja Mzimmia James had arrived in Daytona Beach in June of 1989.

A tall, good-looking, light-skinned black, with a broader vocabulary
than many of his boardwalk cohorts, Teja had come down from his home in
Brooklyn, he says, "for another spring break," and to work, hanging
drywall for his father, who lives in the Holly Hills, a neighboring
community.  He didn't plan to stay long, but when he fell for Lori
Henderson he decided to stick around.

Teja started seeing Lori.  He moved in with his father.

Soon he was haunting the boardwalk as he had in past years.  He and
Kevin Ramsey became drinking pals.

Teja is a friendly enough fellow, part of the great majority of
juvenile delinquents who are not permanently sociopathic, but like the
other boardwalk habitues, Teja cultivated an image as a tough guy.  He
explains it much the way the others would.

"See, on the street I learned to carry myself.  You have to be a tough
guy when you're around a crowd of people, or somebody is going to
always aggravate you or bother you or, you know, put you down or
something.  But when people know that you will strike and you will get
violent TeJa if they cross you in the wrong way, then they'll leave you
alone.

That's the image that most people know of me."

Part of being a tough guy, for Teja, as it had been for J. R and Mike
Cox, was putting word out on the street that he had committed murder.

All three of them had made that claim to at least one person one time,
and that was enough to get it around.  In all three cases it got around
to Kosta and gave him reason to think he had found his assassin.

Whether it is true in any of those cases is not known.

In June Teja worked for three days making change at JoylNand.

There he knew Kosta Fotopoulos as "the man who owned the building," but
didn't meet him.  It was in July, through an incident at Top Shots,
that Teja got to know Kosta.

Teja was shooting pool at Top Shots late one afternoon when some guy
who had swallowed too many beers at the bar started loud-mouthing to
Kevin Ramsey.  Ramsey, not wanting to get in trouble with the boss,
kept cool.  The customer grew gradually more obnoxious and abusive.

Finally Teja decided to help Kevin out by leading the boozer to the
door.

"Get your hands off me, nigger," the customer said, and that was
enough.  Teja made short work of the customer.

"Two hits, it was over," he says.

Kosta, who had watched the incident, was impressed.

He came over and complimented Teja on his fighting skills.

Apparently their short conversation was enough to convince Kosta that
Teja could be trusted, because a few days after the skirmish Kosta told
Teja about a major narcotics sale that was going to go down at a
Daytona warehouse.

"So?"  Teja said.

"I want you to steal the payoff money," Kosta told him.

"He freaked me out with this warehouse thing, because he just came out
of the blue with it," Teja says.  "He asked me to go into the warehouse
with an Uzi, kill everybody there, and bring the cash to him.

I could do with the dope whatever I wanted to."

Though Kosta spoke to him in serious and conspiratorial tones, Teja
suspected that the warehouse existed only in Kosta's imagination, and,
indeed, the plan might have been nothing more than the plot from one of
Kosta's comic books.

"I came back to him later and asked whatever happened to that deal,"
Teja says, "and he told me, "Ah, the license plate turned out to be the
wrong one,' or something."

Though Teja might not have taken the warehouse job seriously he learned
quickly that it could be a deadly mistake not to take Kosta
seriously.

"People were afraid of him.  I was afraid of him when I wasn't carrying
a weapon.  Deidre told me about the time Kosta was going to kill this
one dude that was in her house, not J. R. This is a guy that's got a
permanent burn mark on his neck from the barrel of a gun."

Teja also tells this story of a confrontation that helped fortify
Kosta's legendary image on the boardwalk.

"One night a guy threw a cue ball at Kosta after Kosta had asked him to
leave the bar because he was drunk and belligerent and causing a
problem.  And when the guy shrew the ball, Kosta politely walked over
to him.  The guy went to swing at him, and Kosta did something to the
guy, but before you could blink your eyes, the guy was on the ground
with the 9 millimeter in his mouth, you know.

after that people just stopped bothering Kosta."

The fact that Kosta was a dangerous man is Teja's explanation of why,
when Kosta suggested in late October that Teja kill Lisa, Teja felt
that he was being told, not asked.

Ie knew that bad things could happen to people who didn't do what Kosta
asked.  He knew because of that conversation in Deidre Hunt's bedroom,
when she had shown him the blood-crusted shoes and told him about the
videotaped murder of Kevin Ramsey.

Teja says that it was a few days after that conversation that Kosta
approached him about killing Lisa, though it wasn't immediately clear
what Kosta wanted.

They sat at a table in Deidre's apartment on Lenox, just Teja and
Kosta.  Kosta had prattled on for quite a while, spinning tales of
valor and adventure in the CIA and describing in detail hits he had
made.  "I've killed many people," he told Teja, "but never for less
than two thousand dollars.  If it's under two thousand dollars I won't
mess with it."  Then Kosta stopped talking suddenly, as he sometimes
did.  He stared across the table at Teja.  "I know you know about
Kevin," he said.  "I don't know how you know, but I know you know."

Teja felt his body stiffen.  He didn't know what to expect.

Kosta leaned back in his chair and relaxed, as if to say there was
nothing to worry about.

"How would you like to do a few things for me and get paid for it," he
said.  He allowed a few silent beats, then added, "Instead of going
down the other road?"

Teja knew what the other road was.  It was the road Kevin Ramsey had
taken into the woods off Williamson.

"I could do some work for you," Teja said, squirming in his seat.

This is one dangerous son of a bitch, he thought.  Teja wished he had a
gun with him, because Kosta sure as hell did.  He remembered Lori
telling him about Kosta's torture tapes.

"Good," Kosta said.  "I want you to be a sort of middle man for me."

"Middle man?"

"Sure," Kosta said.  "When people have a problem with me, they come and
talk to you and you bring their request to me."

"Okay," Teja said.  He didn't know what Kosta was talking about
exactly, but that was fine.  He wanted to know as little as possible.

Kevin had known too much.  The way Teja figured it, the more you knew
about Kosta's business, the greater your chances were of ending up tied
to a tree with a flashlight shining in your face and an AK47 pressed
against your skull.

"One other thing," Kosta said.  "Don't try to leave town on me.  I know
where your family lives."

Teja knew this was true.  Kosta had once given him a ride to Teja's
father's house in Holly Hill.

While Teja, like the other boardwalk characters, undoubtedly shaves his
stories to make himself less villainous, his description of Kosta's
proposition has the ring of truth to it.  Deidre, Bill Markantonakis,
and others have reported that Kosta used threats against family as
leverage.  Even Lisa, though she didn't take it seriously at the time,
got a taste of it that night in the Joyland office when Kosta battered
the coffee table, demanded the name of the person who had called her,
and shouted, "If you don't tell me who told you, I'll kill your
brother."

When Kosta finally got to what he really wanted, he told Teja he would
pay him ten thousand dollars to shoot Lisa at Joyland and make it look
like a robbery.  Teja said he would do it.

The first time that Teja was supposed to meet Kosta and get specific
instructions Teja chickened out.  After that, Kosta came up with a new
plan.  He called Teja on the phone, and told him to get a knife and
stab Lisa to death at the Halloween party at Razzles.

Kosta's explanation of how the murder could be committed without
detection in a crowded nightclub is a clear indication that he never
understood that dastardly deeds could be done much more neatly in
adventure movies and comic books than in real life.  His scenario would
have worked in a James Bond film, but likely would have developed a few
hitches at Razzles.

"He told me about the knife, three ribs up," Teja says.

"You know, I forget the name of the muscle, but it contracts your lungs
so you can't breathe.  The diaphragm, [hat's it.  And I was supposed to
go three ribs up from the oack, stab her once, pull it out, stab her
again one rib [lawn, turn it, and bring it out.  That would stop all
talking, ill screaming, all breathing.  Just sit her down in the chair,
TeJa fold her arms in front of her and lean her head down so she
appeared drunk."

With this impractical plan in mind Tej a and Deidre went to the Pic N'
Save, where they bought a knife to kill Lisa with.

On Halloween night Teja went to Razzles with the knife hidden in his
sleeve.  Incredibly, he wore no costume on the one night of the year
when he could hide behind a mask and not draw attention to himself.

There were hundreds of people in the glitzy, raucous nightclub, which
attracts locals and tourists.  Lisa, in her cowgirl outfit, sat at a
small cocktail table surrounded by friends in bear suits and Batman
costumes.  On the other side of the dance floor, beyond dozens of
gyrating partyers, Teja saw Kosta, wearing his black hood.  Yes, Teja
thought, he's staying as far away from his wife as he can get.

"I was going to do it at first," Teja says, "because it seemed like a
now or never thing, you know, that you do something and stop b.sing
around, or you end up like Kevin.  I was standing by Lisa for like
five, ten minutes, but then I left and went over to where Deidre and
Lori were.  And Deidre said, "Go to the bathroom and Kosta's going to
follow you.", When Teja got to the men's room at Razzles Kosta was
waiting.  When the two men were alone Kosta stood by the sink and
pulled off his dark hood.  He reached into a pocket and pulled out a
small piece of paper.

"You know what this is?"  he said.  He held the paper over the sink.

"A check," Teja said.

"A check for ten thousand dollars," Kosta said.  "See.

Look."  He jabbed at the check.  "Look who it's made out to."

Teja looked again.  His own name was on the check.

"Me," he said.

"Right," Kosta said.  "Now here's what you do."  Kosta stood behind
Teja, wrapped his left arm around Teja's chest, and with his right
thumb poked at the spots on Teja's back.  "You get behind Lisa, see,
and you stick the knife in, three ribs up."

Kosta went through the murder plan again, detail by detail.  Then he
gave Teja a friendly pat on the back, and sent him out to murder
Lisa.

This time Teja was determined.  Get it over with, he thought, take the
money and get the hell out.  Now the music was really thumping and the
crowd was getting soused.  For a moment it wasn't hard to imagine
murdering somebody there in the dark nightclub amid the noise and
excitement, and actually walking away without being noticed.  Again
Teja worked his way through the crowd.

He moved close to Lisa.  He could feel the knife in his sleeve, the
small handle pressed against his palm.  Just stick it in her back, he
told himself, three ribs up.  Pull it out.

Stick it in again.  He moved closer.  Lisa was laughing.  The music was
throbbing.  It was so loud that Teja could hardly hear himself think.

People were out on the dance floor, hundreds of them now, pressed so
tightly they could barely wiggle their bodies.  They were dressed as
elves and devils and pirates and princesses.  Just sit her down, people
will think she's drunk.  He stood behind her, pretending to stare out
at the dancers.  It was so crowded that people were bumping into him
when they passed by.  The moment of truth was gaining on him.  What
would Kosta do if he chickened out?  He had to do it.  But as he got
closer and the handle of the knife grew more slippery from the sweat on
his hand, the whole idea became less real.

The crowd, which moments ago had seemed to promise cover and anonymity,
now seemed to stare back at him, a thousand witnesses.  How the hell
could he knife a woman in this madhouse?  He couldn't do it.

No.  Not here, not with all these people.

"I looked at Deidre and Lori.  I said, "Man, I can't do this.  I'm too
nervous.  There's too many people watching me."  And Deidre's like, "Oh
shit, Kosta's going to be mad.

Oh,fuck."" A few minutes later Deidre met with Kosta in a stall in the
men's room and told him that Teja was afraid to put the knife in Lisa's
back.

When Kosta came out of the men's room he told Teja, "Don't worry about
it.  I'll call you tomorrow morning between eight-thirty and nine."

The next morning Kosta called Teja and told him to meet him in the
parking lot of the Texan Hotel.  There Kosta got into Teja's car.

They drove to Deidre's apartment.  Kosta and Deidre went into the
bedroom and had sexual intercourse for half an hour.  When Kosta came
out he told Teja how he was to kill Lisa.

The new plan was a return to the old plan.  Teja was to kill Lisa in
her office at Joyland.

"The three of us drove up by the boardwalk.  Kosta showed me where I
was going to go.  He showed me where Dina's car is parked, where his
wife is going to park, what time Dina leaves, what times she's supposed
to be there, where we're going to wait so we can watch Dina's car and
where Deidre is supposed to pick me up after I'm done."

By this time Teja already had the gun he was to use on Lisa.  It was a
.22 caliber pistol.  The friend who sold it to him had warned Teja that
the gun always jammed after one shot.  Teja had planned to fix the gun,
but says he never had a file small enough.

In the car that morning, Kosta, as was his style, gave Teja very
specific instructions about how to kill the woman he had married.

"When you get in the office punch her in the face," Kosta said.

"Knock her back into the office, then step in and close the door.

Pull the gun on her, take her to the back of the office.  The gun won't
be heard through that wall.

"When you get her back there, order her to take off her jewelry.

Don't rip it off.  It's Greek gold and I want it back.

Don't touch anything metal.  Also, there's a little box that looks like
a remote control door opener.  Don't let her get to it.  It's an alarm
that can be placed anywhere in the office.  Shoot her two times in the
back of the head and leave."

At one-thirty on the same day, Wednesday, November 1, Teja and Deidre
pulled into the parking lot of Hog Heaven, a popular barbecue spot on
the west side of Atlantic Avenue.  From where they sat they could see
Dina drive off.  When Dina drove away, at around two-fifteen, Teja knew
that Lisa was alone in the office.

What follows is Teja's version of what happened that day.

"I got out of the car, walked through the Hog Heaven parking lot,
across AlA, and across the dirt mound, down the steps into the game
room.  And I sat there at a game.

It was this jet fighter game where you sit there and play.

I was playing the game because there was this guy making change right
by the door.  He left and walked off.  I stopped playing the game.  I
went and knocked on the door and she opened the door.  And I put my
hand on the wall and I said, "Is Kosta here?"  And she said, "No."  And
I said, "Do you know what time he's coming back, I'm supposed to talk
to him about a job."  And she said, "No, what is it you want?"

And then I noticed that she looked down and she saw the gun, and then
she looked back up at me and she sort of cringed a little bit, you
know, like she was scared or something.

"And that's when I pulled out the gun and said, "Get back in the
office."  She dove on the ground and she said, "No."  I told her, I
said, "Get up, bitch."  She got up and I said, "Get in the office' and
she said, "No, you get in the office."  I'm like, "What are you,
crazy?

You get in the office."  She said, "No, you get in the office."

And then I told her something and then she ran off.  She came back and
said, "Get in the office."  I said, "No, you get in the office."

She said, "No, you get in the office,' and we went through that ordeal
again.  And I cocked the gun and I aimed it at her, and then she
finally took off.

"I put the gun back in my jacket, walked by the lady at the cashier,
and waved at her and kept walking."

When Teja got out on AlA Deidre picked him up.

"How did it go?"  she asked.  "Is she dead?  How many times did you
shoot her?"

"I didn't kill her," Teja told Diedre.  "She got away."

"Oh, shit.  Kosta's going to be mad."

They drove back to Deidre's place and waited for Kosta to call.

When Kosta learned that his wife was still alive, he was frantic.

"How am I going to deal with this?  How am I going to deal with this!" 
he said.  He told Teja to go home.  "Don't leave your house until I
call you," he said.

So Teja, like Mike Cox, and J. R. before him, saved his own life by not
committing the murder of Lisa Fotopoulos.

In his original court deposition Teja claimed that before knocking on
the office door he went into the men's room and pulled the clip from
the gun.  He later admitted that this was not true.  However, there are
indications that Teja was less than zealous about killing Lisa
Fotopoulos.  Even before he was arrested he told some of his boardwalk
friends that he didn't want to kill her and had deliberately botched
the Joyland attempt.

"I went there with the intention of doing it," he says.

"But when I was playing the video game I realized I couldn't.  I was
like, man, I can't kill this lady.  If she had gone back into the
office when I told her to, I would have been fucked."

Certainly it is self-serving for Teja to say this even if it is not
true.  On the other hand he did miss the first scheduled planning
session with Kosta.  He did avoid killing Lisa at the Halloween
party.

And on this occasion he did have a clear shot at Lisa, but let her get
away.  So maybe Teja really was taking each plan only as far as his
conscience allowed, in order to avoid being shot himself.  This
scenario is made more credible by the fact that the next assassin acted
in similar fashion.

David Damore, the assistant state attorney, believes that of all the
kids involved in the plot to murder Lisa, Teja is the one most likely
to straighten out.  "He's the one I am most hopeful for," Damore
says.

"There is a certain likability about Teja.  He's young enough,
resourceful enough, that he will have a lot of opportunities.  He's a
handsome young fellow, and I grew to like him, though not his
actions.

I want to call him a scoundrel.  If you didn't know what he got
involved with you could like him very much.

He's a friendly kind of fellow, he's got an aura about him.

It takes a while to get him to tell you the truth, but once you get him
to tell the truth he's charming.  He has reclunted his story about the
gun not being loaded.  The gun was loaded and Lisa did come within an
inch of her life."

Edgewater ad, you could have been killed," Kosta said to Lisa after he
learned that some young black man had assaulted her.  He seemed
extremely agitated.  Lisa was touched by his concern.  Almost
immediately, Kosta went to work installing a security system that would
protect his wife from another incident like the holdup attempt.  At the
office he put in an intercom so that anybody ringing the buzzer on the
door would have to speak into the intercom and identify himself before
the door would be unlocked.

"He got me a walkie-talkie set," Lisa says.  "I could give one to
whoever was working the floor.  That way if I had any trouble I could
call for help.  He gave me a rifle, too.

He said I could scare off people with it."

For the rest of the day Lisa was extremely edgy.  Kosta stayed with
her, hammering out his security system and boasting that it was
foolproof.

At one point Lisa opened a drawer and noticed that her gun, the one she
would have needed to save her life if the holdup man had gotten her
alone in the office, was missing.

"Kosta, do you know what happened to my gun?"

"Gun?  What gun?"

"My gun, Kosta.  The one you gave me.  The one I keep in the office."

"Oh, that," Kosta said.  "I lent it to somebody."

"Who?"

"A guy I know," Kosta said.

While it was unnerving to realize that her life might have depended on
getting to a gun that wouldn't have been there, Lisa found nothing
particularly suspicious about the fact that the gun was gone.

It was typical of Kosta to lend someone a gun.  He passed guns around
the way other people pass around popcorn.  Lisa accepted his
explanation without comment.  Besides, she had a gun in the glove
compartment of her Porsche.  She would just bring that gun into the
office tomorrow.  All these guns, she thought.  I went my whole life
without ever even seeing a gun and now I'm surrounded by them.

It was after dark on that same night, November 1, when Lisa and Kosta
left Joyland.  As usual, they walked up the back stairs to Ocean
Avenue, where both of their cars were parked.  She took deep breaths;
that was supposed to calm you down.  She could hear the sound of the
ocean, a block 3way.  She studied the sky above it, now gone gray in
the twilight of a November evening, and thought wistfully that it would
be great if she and Kosta could just get away for a while to someplace
safe.  Maybe she and Kosta could patch things up if they had some time
away from the pressures of family and work.  November 4 was just three
days away, and she looked forward to a good talk on the drive to Key
West.

As they walked out of Joyland and headed for their separate cars, Kosta
gave Lisa an affectionate hug.  "I know you're still upset about the
holdup attempt," he said.  "But everything's all right now."  Then he
told Lisa that he wanted to watch a war film that night, so he said he
was going to stop at the video store to rent a film.  Lisa knew that
her mother and Dina were out, and still shaken by the days events, she
did not want to go home to an empty house.

"I'll follow you in my car," she told Kosta.

Kosta, in the BMW, took a left down the small hill to Atlantic, then
right.  Lisa, in her Porsche, followed him.

Almost from the beginning of the drive Lisa had the eerie feeling that
she was being followed.  She couldn't quite be sure.  For a long time
they drove straight up Atlantic Avenue, so there was nothing really
unusual about having the same car behind her all the time.

There were hundreds of cars driving up and down Atlantic Avenue.

This was the dinner hour, and the people who weren't heading home for
supper, were scouting out restaurants.  But the car behind her, with
its high beams bouncing off her rearview mirror, seemed intent on
something else.  It seemed to have a purpose, a purpose that involved
Lisa.

Lisa couldn't see the driver or even what kind of car it was.  But it
troubled her.  The car seemed always too close, and she got the feeling
that the driver was intent on keeping up with her.  It's paranoia, she
thought.  Nerves.  The young black man with the gun had invaded some
part of her inner life and left it open to fear.  It's just nerves, she
told herself.  Nevertheless, when Kosta stopped at a light and Lisa
fell in line behind him, she reached over and snapped open the glove
compartment to get the gun.

She felt around for the .38 caliber revolver.  At first it seemed not
to be there and that scared her.  Then she felt it, the reassuring heft
of the gun.  Protection.  She pulled the gun out and held it on her
lap.

On the other side of the intersection was a pickup truck with two good
old boys hooting and hollering and playing their radio too loud.

Those are the kind of people who are supposed to be carrying guns in
their cars, not me, she thought.  She patted the pistol once before the
light changed.  This is nuts, she thought, what am I going to do, shoot
somebody?  It was a holdup attempt.  It had nothing to do with me,
personally.

But still she was on edge.  In a two-week period she had had two auto
mishaps and a holdup attempt.  On top of that, she had been told that
her husband was sleeping with another woman.  Yes, she thought, we
definitely need a vacation.  More deeply in the past, but still
weighing heavily on her, were the deaths of her grandmother, and her
father, and the miscarriage.  She put the gun on the seat beside her.

She put her hands on the steering wheel, then grabbed quickly for the
gun, testing to see how fast she could get it into her hand and in a
firing position if need be.

The video store was on Granada, a simple left off Atlantic, but before
they got to Granada, Kosta took a different left and then a right onto
a dark and quiet neighborhood street.  Lisa followed him.

It was a way to get to the store, but it wasn't any shorter, so it
didn't make sense to her that he would take it.

In her rearview mirror she saw the lights swinging around the corner
behind her.  The car was following her.

Her heart started pounding.  Oh God, what is going on, she thought.

She reached over for the gun.  Kosta slowed down, forcing her to slow
down.  The car behind her came closer, its lights blinding her.

Oh, my God, someone is trying to kill me, someone is trying to kill
me.

She was at once terrified by the thought, and struck by how absurd it
was.  She squeezed the gun in her right hand.  She felt as if she were
crushing it.  Then Kosta picked up speed.  At the end of the block he
turned right.  Lisa hurried after him.  The car behind her turned
left.

Through her rearview mirror she watched its rear lights grow smaller in
the distance until it was out of sight.

By the time Lisa pulled in next to Kosta's car at the video store in a
small plaza, she was near panic.  She sat in her car,
hyperventilating.

Slow down, take deep breaths, she told herself.  For a moment she
thought about taking the gun into the store with her, but decided no,
that was crazy, and she shoved it back in the glove compartment.  Her
hand ached from holding it.  Her face was sweating.  She got out of her
car and rushed to her husband.

"I think I was being followed," she said.

Kosta laughed.  "Are you serious, honey?"  he said.

"I know, I know, it's crazy, but I think someone's following me."

Kosta laughed again and put an arm around her.

"Nobody's following you," he said.  "You're just imagining things.

You're shook up over what happened today."

Lisa knew he was probably right.  It was just her mind playing tricks
on her.  Not surprising.  Why wouldn't she be a little paranoid.

She'd had a loaded gun pointed at her just a few hours earlier.

After Kosta picked out a film, they left the video store and drove
home.  Lisa again had the feeling that she was being followed.  It's
all in your mind, she told herself over and over.  When they got home
she rushed into the house and quickly set the alarm system.

The drive to the video store was not the last strange incident of the
day.

Lisa made supper and she and Kosta talked for a while about the holdup
attempt.  Kosta assured her that she was now protected.  She had an
alarm, she had a walkie-talkie, and she had a husband who packed a
gun.

She told him she thought the gunman was someone he knew, someone she
might have seen around Top Shots, but Kosta took little interest.

Later, Peter Kouracos came over to watch the movie with them.

They got into a debate about something or other Peter tended to be
argumentative-and by ten o'clock they still hadn't shoved the film into
the VCR.  Kosta excused himself.  He stood up and walked out of the
room, leaving Lisa and Peter to chat.  Kosta went to the basement,
where he had a gun workshop.

A few minutes later Lisa heard loud noises coming from the back of the
house.  She went downstairs and opened the door to the backyard.

"Kosta was over by the barbecue area," she remembers.

"Kosta,' I said, "Let's watch the movie.  What are you doing?"  He
said, "I'm burying something."  He was over by the barbecue pit,
digging with a small shovel.  It was dark and I couldn't tell what he
was burying, exactly, but it looked like some sort of brown
briefcase.

Oh, boy, Rambo strikes again, I thought."

Lisa didn't ask Kosta what he was burying that night.

She had gotten used to this eccentricity of his.  Though he had never
buried things at home before, he, of course, had often buried guns and
other survival equipment in the woods.  Kosta, the great survivalist,
had also marked trees, drawn maps, written codes.  He liked to think
that he could survive under any circumstances, and this business of
burying guns and supplies was, as best she could figure, just one
aspect of what ultimately had to be seen as a hobby.

Since Kosta seemed in all other respects to be normal, all this had to
be viewed as boyish mischief.  On this particular night, Lisa thought
maybe Kosta had used his metal detector to find the guns he had
misplaced and was now reburying them near the barbecue pit so that he
wouldn't lose them again.

On Thursday, November 2, Lisa identified Teja James as the man who had
assaulted her from a photo lineup that the police brought to her
house.

When Dina pointed out that Teja had worked at Joyland and was someone
whom Kosta and Deidre knew, Kosta played it down.  "Yeah, Teja, that's
right," Kosta said.  "I guess I do see him around sometimes, yeah,
you're right."  Kosta left immediately.

That afternoon Lisa and Kosta drove in Kosta's car to Edgewater, a
forty-five-minute drive south, on the other side of the river.  They
owned the duplex there, which they had purchased jointly but which
Kosta managed.  While Lisa didn't know about the tenant who wasn't
paying the rent, she knew that the other unit was empty, and this trip
was to meet a man who wanted to take a look at the vacancy.

By this time Lisa was a wreck.  It was extremely upsetting to realize
for sure that the young man who had attacked her was someone who knew
Kosta and Deidre.  She had an uneasy feeling that there could be some
connection between Kosta's affair and this attack.

But she also understood that she was tense and that it was natural for
her to be making paranoid connections.  After all, only eighteen hours
or so earlier, she had been certain that someone was following her.

She had been trying along the way to nail down Teja in her head.

She knew he was from around the boardwalk, but she couldn't quite
remember him.

"Oh, you know Teja," Kosta kept saying.  "He's the fellow worked at
Joyland for a while."  He said it several times, always connecting Teja
to Joyland, more than to his own circle of acquaintances.

"Yes," Lisa finally snapped, "I know Teja, he's the boy who damn near
killed me."

Then she stared out at the highway, trying to make sense of things.

For a long time she felt as if she had done something wrong and didn't
know what it was.

"Kosta," she said, when she was finally ready to talk about her fears,
"you don't think Teja's going to try to hurt me, do you?"

When Kosta spoke his voice was strangely cold.  "You can identify him,"
Kosta said.  "If I was Teja I'd track you down and kill you."

"Gee, thanks for the reassurance," Lisa said.  His words chilled her.

She had wanted comfort from her husband, for him to say, "No, honey,
that's crazy, he won't hurt you."

The more Lisa thought about it, the more it troubled her that the man
who had pulled a gun on her was a friend of the alleged other woman in
her husband's life.

"You can't tell me that Deidre didn't know Teja was going to come and
rob me," she said.

Kosta didn't answer.  He drove along, one hand on the wheel of his BMW,
and one hand on his jacket where he carried the gun, his usual driving
posture.

"I know," he said excitedly a few minutes later.  "Maybe somebody hired
Teja to kill you!"

"Hired someone to kill me?  That's crazy.  Who would do a thing like
that?"

"Alfred Fuller," Kosta said.  Fuller was one of the top people at the
Marriott.

"Al Fuller?"  Lisa shrieked.  "Kosta, are you out of your mind?

Al Fuller is a respectable businessman.  What are you talking so crazy
for?"

"Well, you know he's always talking bad about you and the boardwalk
people," Kosta said.  "He wants to build a hotel there.  He thinks you
and Dina are all that's stopping him.  Maybe he thinks if he had you
killed everybody else would give in."

Lisa couldn't believe that Kosta could even suggest such a thing.

The fact that he did only brought closer to the surface of her thoughts
the festering fear that Kosta, himself, was somehow involved.

It is difficult to say at what level Lisa now considered the
possibility that her own husband was somehow connected to the holdup.

Certainly that idea, so far unspoken, was a presence between them all
during the drive to Edgewater.  The idea that maybe Kosta was trying to
kill her was, on the one hand, so logical, and on the other, so
unthinkable and dramatic, that Lisa could neither dismiss it, nor take
it seriously.  It became for them on that drive something like a loaded
gun in the hands of a child.  It was something they could play with,
but it was something very dangerous.

They were driving along with this wordless tension between them when
suddenly Kosta pulled his hand away from his jacket.  Lisa panicked.

She jumped forward in her seat.  "What are you doing?"  she shrieked.

In an instant she realized that Kosta had reached up to adjust the
rearview mirror.

"What's the matter with you?"  Kosta said.  "What did you think, that I
was going to kill you?"

"Well, yeah," Lisa said, and they both started laughing.

Lisa laughed long and hard, letting all the pent-up tension come out in
giggles.  "God, I thought I was a goner there for a minute."

When all her laughter was spent Lisa tapped her husband playfully on
the shoulder.  "For all I know," she said, "you could be behind this
whole thing.  You could be taking me somewhere to shoot me."

"Naw," Kosta said.  "I wouldn't shoot you."

Now they had shifted into a tone of baby talk, a kind of playful way of
speaking that was something special between them when they were first
married.

"Oh, you wouldn't, huh?  Why not?"

Because I love you, she wanted him to say.

"Because I would get blood all over my car," he said.

"Oh, thanks."

"Besides, why would I?"  Kosta said.

"For the insurance money."

"No, it wouldn't be worth it," Kosta said.  "I'd have to share the
money with Dina."

It was not the answer Lisa wanted to hear.  It made her uneasy.

It sounded as if Kosta had actually thought about it.

ON the night of November 1, when Lisa was terrified because she thought
she was being followed to the video store, she was not just being
hysterical.  She really was being followed.  The young man in the car
behind her was Bryan Chase, age eighteen.

Bryan Chase was, by all accounts, cut from different cloth than the
other boardwalk drifters.  For one thing, he was a local kid, not a
disgruntled runaway from a city to the north.  He was a big and
easygoing kid, a bit of a hayseed, somewhat immature, and easily
manipulated by other people.

Mary Mullaley, one of J. R."s girlfriends, recalls, "Bryan was real
nice.  He wouldn't do anything wrong, he wouldn't steal or anything.

He was a totally different person from the others."

Bryan came from a broken home, something he had in common with Deidre,
Teja, J. R Mike Cox, Kevin Ramsey, Lori Henderson, and virtually every
other boardwalk malcontent.  He had grown up in a small West Virginia
town that had a population smaller than that of the Marriott Hotel
during speed week.  In Daytona Beach, Bryan lived with his father,
David, and his stepmother, Amber Cysneski.

Bryan, according to his father, never got in trouble with the law.

"He was a pretty good, likeable kid, didn't get in fights with people,
no, sir," says David Chase.  "Yes, he could be manipulated by the wrong
crowd, no doubt about that, and he could be easily intimidated.  He
would give you the shirt off his back, but when it came to the ladies
he would have no willpower."

The lady for whom Bryan had no willpower in October and November of
1989, the one who could play him like a fiddle, was Deidre Hunt.  In
fact, he told a number of friends that he was smitten with Deidre and
wanted to have sex with her.  He told one friend that he was dating
Deidre and that she was a nymphomaniac.

"A woman could manipulate Bryan real easily," says Amber Cysneski.

"He liked older women, that's ll he ever talked about.  J. R. and them
told me he liked Deidre, that he was infatuated with her.  I'm sure he
could be manipulated by her."

Bryan, however, might have been more dreamer than coxswain.  J.

R who considered Bryan his closest Daytona friend, says, "Bryan never
got laid in his life.  He wanted to be like me, get laid.  But he did
not have a good style with the girls."

Deidre Hunt, in any case, was among the new cast of characters who
entered Bryan's life in the fall of 1989, when he started hanging
around the boardwalk.  By the time David Chase and Amber Cysneski met
Deidre briefly on November 2, they had become concerned about Bryan's
new friends.

"He would sneak them in the window of his room at night, in and out, in
and out," Cysneski says.  "I saw them a few times in the living room,
but they didn't stick around too much when we were around.  He was
hanging around the boardwalk a lot.  I knew he was going to get in
trouble.

It's not unusual for a boy his age to have kids over a lot, but he was
working and they weren't.  They weren't any good, I could tell that.

They read him out real easy, them kids knew he wasn't like them."

At the boardwalk Bryan was friends with Kevin Ramsey, who sometimes did
repairs on Bryan's car, and J. R who once spent a few days living in
the Chase apartment.

Though David and Amber were troubled by the fact that Bryan hung around
Top Shots pool hall on the boardwalk and had made so many friends from
that area, there was really nothing so awful that they could point to
in his behavior.  David and Amber both worked long hours, and they had
a new baby to take care of, so they saw little of Bryan.  Besides,
Bryan had always been a good kid, and he worked as a houseman at the
Desert Inn Hotel, where his father was employed.  It wasn't as if he
were a bum, even if some of his friends were.

"I didn't know Bryan's friends so well," David says.

"Now I wish I would have."

Though he saw little of his son, during the month of October David saw
enough of him to notice that Bryan seemed to change.

"Normally he would joke," David Chase says.  "But now he would kind of
snap back if you said something, not take it the way it was meant.  If
you asked him something he would be kind of like, it's none of your
business."

The reason Bryan was so moody during these days was that he had agreed
to murder Lisa Fotopoulos, and it was tearing him up.  Though Bryan's
lust for Deidre Hunt undoubtedly played a part in getting him drawn
into the plot (she either gave him sex or held out the promise of it is
likely that the glue that held Bryan to his murder commitment was the
threat of his being murdered by Kosta.  Bryan, according to Robert
Rinehart, who worked with him at the Desert Inn, "was afraid of his own
shadow."

And he was, according to his father, "not a violent person at all."

"He was macho," David Chase says.  "He had a stocky build.

He worked out and he'd wear tight-fitting clothes to show his
muscles.

But it was more of a look than a reality.  He was not gunwise.  I had
lots of guns in West Virginia, but Bryan never even liked to hunt or
fish."

After the Teja Joyland fiasco, according to Deidre, Kosta was
"pissed."

He told Deidre that she had two hours to arrange Lisa's death.

"He wanted me to steal a car and hit her with a car, and then shoot
her," Deidre says.

Lori Henderson recalls, "Deidre was sitting on the kitchen floor crying
because Teja hadn't killed Lisa.  She said that since Teja hadn't done
it, Kosta would make her do it.  I told her just leave, you know, go
back to Massachusetts, and all of that, and she was crying and she was
afraid of him.  She thought Kosta had all this information from the CIA
and all this stuff, and he had the tape of her killing Kevin."

Deidre, not wanting to murder Lisa herself, turned to Bryan.

"I asked Bryan if he wanted to do it and he said yes,'' is the
maddeningly simple way Deidre put it to the police in her November 7
confession.

Lori Henderson recalls, "Deidre went to Bryan's house looking for J.

R.

J. R. wasn't there, but Deidre stood there talking to Bryan for a while
and then she came back downstairs and she said, "Bryan is going to do
it."  Deidre gave Bryan the gun that Teja had used in his failed
attempt.  She had gotten it back from Teja and had been keeping it in a
sock under the front seat of a Ford LTD she had rented from Cheapo Rent
A Car.  "That way," she explains, "if it was found it would be thrown
out of court, because anybody can leave a gun in a rental car."

By this time nearly everybody, except Bryan, knew that the gun would
jam after the first shot.

While Kosta, apparently, did not rig the gun this way (it was like that
when Teja got it) he made no effort to repair or replace the gun.

One might think that Kosta, since he planned to shoot Bryan after Bryan
shot Lisa, took great comfort in knowing the gun could not be fired a
second time.  However, as Deidre tells it, Kosta never got it through
his head that the gun would jam, even though she and Tej a told him
several times.  He kept saying that Bryan should shoot Lisa "four times
in the head."  While it is hard to imagine that Kosta would want a
loaded gun in the hand of a man he intended to kill, it is equally hard
to believe that he would want his entire murder scheme to depend on a
single .22 bullet fired by a nervous and inexperienced teenager.

David Damore agrees that Kosta probably never digested the information
that the gun would jam.  "Kosta thought he knew everything," Damore
says, "and he wasn't going to listen to these people.  When he was told
the gun would jam, it probably went in one ear and out the other."

However, as Damore sees it, even with only one bullet, the death of
Lisa Fotopoulos seemed certain.

"This gun, this twenty-two," Damore says, "is the perfect murder
weapon.  It takes one slug in the brain to kill somebody.  The .22 is a
devastating round going through the body.  It bounces around in there
like a pinball."

Bryan Chase's first set of murder instructions was to watch Joyland on
the night of November 1 and follow Lisa when she left.  He was to
follow her in his car and crash into her.  When Lisa got out to
exchange licenses Bryan was to shoot her and kill her.

This, by the way, is the earliest reference by Deidre, Lori, or any of
the others, to the use of an auto accident as the ruse to kill Lisa.

None of them report any knowledge of the two auto mishaps Lisa had in
October, and Kosta, of course, still denies any attempts on Lisa's
life.  So it will probably never be known whether or not the two
earlier accidents were bungled murder attempts or just bizarre
coincidences unconnected to the later attempts on Lisa.

Possibly they were genuine accidents, but they gave Kosta the idea of
committing the murder this way.

In any case, Bryan, on the night of November 1, watched Joyland from
the McDonald's across the street, and Deidre and Lori watched Bryan
from the parking lot.  "He was supposed to hit her Porsche and say,
"I'm sorry, lady' and go over and shoot her," Deidre says.  This was
the night that Bryan followed Lisa almost to the video store.

Later, he explained that he had turned off because of some confusion in
signals.  Most likely, he just chickened out, or was confused by the
fact that Lisa's car was following Kosta's to the video store instead
of heading for the house on Halifax, as he'd expected.

On the night of November 2 Bryan followed Lisa all the way home and
still didn't ram her.  Clearly, Bryan was trying to avoid this
murder.

But he never quite threw in his cards.  Whether he was kept in the game
by dreams of sex with Deidre or nightmares of death by Kosta is a
matter for speculation.

About this unrealized attempt, Deidre says, "Bryan followed Lisa all
the way home and didn't do it.  Lori and I were following him, we were
like two or three blocks behind but we ended up getting lost.  We ended
up on John Anderson because Halifax turns into John Anderson.

We went all the way up to Ormond because we thought we were still on
Halifax."

Again it seems Lisa's life was spared because the people who wanted her
dead, as treacherous as they were, sometimes behaved like Keystone
Kops.  Perhaps if Lori and Deidre had been nearby, instead of getting
lost in their rented car, Bryan would not have backed out that night.

"We went back to McDonald's,'' Deidre says.  [Bryan was there and he
told me, "I can't believe this, I had a chance."  He was telling us
about the chance that he had and he fucked up.  I said, "Fuck it, go
home."  I told him it had to be done and we'd probably get back to him
tomorrow.  The next day Kosta said, "What happened,' and I said, "Well,
he didn't get a chance, his car didn't make it there."  So Kosta was
mad.  Kosta wanted him to come in the house and do it while she was
sleeping.  Kosta said, "Okay, alright, we have to find a way, since we
got this kid involved we've got to make him do it, and he's expendable,
too."  Bryan was going to live if he had done it with the car.

Kosta told me he wanted Bryan to get in the house, shoot her in her
sleep, and he would shoot Bryan on the way out."

Kosta told Deidre that Bryan would have to come through a window,
because an alarm would go off if he came through a door.

During the forty-eight hours before Bryan actually got into the house
there were a couple of fruitless murder missions concerning the
window.

The exact details are uncertain because Deidre's memory of them is hazy
and because Bryan was probably lying to her, anyhow.

Obviously, he was trying to botch this murder, buy some time, and maybe
find a way out.

The first time Bryan went to the house under the new murder plan, he
came back and told Deidre he could not break the window.  He was then
supplied with a glass cutter.  Next he came back and said that he had
been scared off by the sound of neighbors.  In all, Bryan Chase managed
to fail to kill Lisa at least six times, probably more.

By the night of Friday, November 3, the window plan had been altered.

Instead of breaking a window at the front of the house, Bryan would go
to the back of the house.  At the back, facing the swimming pool, there
is a grid of small square windows.  The windows almost certainly would
be too small to accommodate a strapping young man like Bryan, and we
have to assume this was obvious to Kosta.

So the plan, it seems, was that at some hour early Saturday morning,
while the house was still dark, Kosta, certain that Lisa was asleep,
would sneak downstairs and turn off the basement light to signal the
waiting Bryan to come into the house.  Kosta would then turn off the
alarm and unlock the sliding glass door at the back of the house so
that Bryan could get in.  Bryan would break one of the small windows at
the back, to create the appearance that a burglar had come through the
window.  But, in fact, he would slip through the open door.  (One
alternative theory on this is that Kosta really thought Bryan could fit
through one of the small windows and only unlocked the door after he
heard Bryan struggling with the window.) Bryan would move through the
house to the upstairs bedroom, directed by Kosta.  He would shoot Lisa
in the head at close range, killing her while Kosta watched.

(In fact, according to Teja, Kosta wanted to videotape the murder of
his wife, but decided it would be impractical.) Then, Bryan would steal
some valuables to enhance the appearance of a burglary and get out.

That probably is what was to happen, as Bryan understood it.

The Suspicion At three o'clock on November 1, after the apparent holdup
attempt, Dina Paspalakis returned to Joyland from the bank.  As soon as
he walked down the back stairs into the arcade he saw police and knew
something was wrong.

"My sister," he said.  "Where's my sister?"

"I'm okay," Lisa called from the doorway of the office, where she was
talking to one of the policemen.  She rushed to Dina, slipped into his
arms, and cried.

"There was a man with a gun," she said.  "He tried to force me back
into the office.  Dina, I was so scared."  Dina held Lisa for a long
time.  She was sobbing and trembling.

"It's okay," he told her.  "You're safe now."

At eleven o'clock the next morning, Thursday, November 2, Dina paced
nervously in the living room of the house on North Halifax.

Along with Lisa and Kosta, he waited for Detective Bill Adamy of the
Daytona Beach police department to arrive with photos of suspects.

Dina's hands were still shaking.  How close had he come to losing his
sister, he wondered.  After all, the holdup man carried a gun.

Maybe the tall young black man was some crazed heroin addict who could
kill without conscience.  Dina had The Suspicion heard of such
people.

Maybe if Lisa had handled it differently she would be dead.  It was an
incredible thought, the worst thing Dina could imagine.  The crime had
shaken him badly.  More than ever, he realized how much Lisa meant to
him.

Lisa had always been Dina's soul mate.  As kids they had fought rarely,
certainly not like other siblings they knew.

They did have their rivalrys, but they were always friendly.

Lisa would sometimes howl when Shootin' Sam would outdraw Dina at
Joyland "by the time you got your gun out of your holster you were dead
for half an hour," she would say-but she would always admit that she
had been just as slow with a gun.

Later, when they were both teenagers dispensing quarters at Joyland,
they would now and then challenge each other at pinball.

Though Lisa would never play racquetball, and certainly not basketball,
with Dina, they did go places together picnics, movies, concerts.

When the boys started flocking around Lisa, she told Dina which ones
she liked and which ones she didn't.  She wanted, she said, to meet a
boy as nice as Dina.  And when Dina worried about his looks, it was
always Lisa who told him that he was really quite a good-looking kid,
which was true.  And when he wondered if girls would like him, she
said, "Are you kidding?  They'll be crazy about you."

"Really?"

"Well, sure," Lisa would say.  "Look at you, you're big, you're
handsome, you've got sexy brown eyes.  Let's face it, you're"she would
put a hand to her mouth and giggle-"a nice Greek boy."  Which did not
entirely please Dina, because he definitely was not in the market for a
nice Greek girl.

Even college had not diluted their closeness.  When Lisa went off to
the University "of South Florida, she called often from Tampa, talking
to Dina, who was still in high school, for hours about her professors,
her grades, and her friends.

Later, Dina went to the same school, and after he graduated with
honors, he went on to law school at the University of Miami.

Only Lisa knew the truth, that Dina had never wanted to go to law
school.  He did it for his parents, who wanted their son to become a
lawyer.  It didn't take Dina long to develop a deep hatred for law
school.  Dina didn't like the uncertainty of legal cases.  Like his
sister, he preferred the yes or no of accounting.  Either things add up
or they don't, no ambiguity.  When he was in law school he would call
Lisa.

"I hate it here," he told her.  "I feel like I'm in the Florida state
penitentiary."

"Then withdraw," she told him.

"But what about mom and dad?"

"What about them?"

"Oh, no big deal or anything.  It's just that I will destroy their
biggest dream, that's all."

"They'll be hurt," Lisa said, "but it's your life, Dina, you've got to
do what's best for you."

"Maybe I should finish one more semester and then tell everybody how I
feel."

"That's a great idea, Dina.  There's a big call for people who finished
one more semester of law school before quitting."

"Huh?"

"Dina, the hell with it.  Just quit.  You're unhappy.  You should leave
now."

So Dina dropped out of law school and he never regretted it.

Steno and Mary were upset and there was much drama at home for a while,
but Lisa stuck up for Dina.

Dina sometimes wondered, if Lisa hadn't been there for him would he
have had the strength to drop out or would he be working at a
profession he hated?

Now, on the morning of November 2, Dina felt that Lisa needed him to be
there for her, but he wasn't sure why he felt that way.  Was she in
danger?  Was that it?  Who was this young black man with a gun?

Would he try it again?

The Suspicion Dina was anxious for the police to catch the guy.

And that's why Adamy was coming, to show Lisa a photo lineup of
possible suspects.

Maybe Kosta can help, Dina thought.  After all, he knows every bum on
the boardwalk.

When Adamy arrived he laid out one big sheet of photos on the coffee
table in the center of the living room.  It showed a dozen mug shots of
young black men.

"We don't know if your man is among them," he said, "but he might
be."

Lisa stood in front of the photos.  Kosta and Dina stood just behind
her.

As Dina stared down at the lineup of photos he realized that he
recognized one of the men.  It's Teja, he thought, staring at the photo
of the young light-skinned black man.

Dina remembered that Teja had once been thrown out of Walk-In Charlies,
an arcade run by a friend of Dina's, for fighting.  In fact, he
remembered that Teja had worked at Joyland for a few days.  Dina's
manager had hired Teja in Dina's absence, and though Dina didn't like
Teja he could see no reason to fire him.  But in less than a week Teja
got himself fired by constantly making remarks about Dina in front of
the manager.  Teja also hung around Top Shots, so Kosta certainly knew
him.  Kosta, also looking at the photos, said nothing.  Why doesn't
Kosta say something, Dina wondered.  He must recognize Tej a.

"It's him," Lisa suddenly said.  "That's the one."

She was pointing to the photo of Teja.

In that moment, when Lisa pointed to the photo of Teja, it was as if
she had given Dina the final number he needed to balance an accounting
problem.  It was also the most shocking realization of his life.  Dina
stood behind his sister, and beside his brother-in-law, dazed, as if
he'd been hit over the head, and in seconds his mind reviewed a series
of facts leading to a conclusion that perhaps had already been there
waiting to be discovered.

Lisa had, of course, told Dina about the affair Kosta was supposedly
having with Deidre.  Although Lisa was not certain it was true, Dina
was.  He had once seen Kosta and Deidre shooting pool together at Top
Shots.  It was an innocent enough thing on the surface, and so he had
never reported it to his sister.  But even at the moment it happened,
there was something in it that troubled him.  It had seemed as if Kosta
and Deidre, in their smiles and their body language, had made too much
effort to say "We're only playing pool" when they hadn't been accused
of anything else.  When Lisa had told Dina about Elena's phone call,
the rumor of an affair had resonated with that moment in the pool hall,
and he had been certain that Kosta and Deidre were lovers.

Now Dina made more connections, terrible connections.

He was sure that Kosta was having an affair with Deidre.

He knew that Deidre's closest friend was Lori Henderson.

And he knew that Lori's boyfriend was Teja.  (Dina also made another
connection at the time, which, though it was "ncorrect, shows that his
instincts were to link the Kosta/Deidre romance with the assault on
Lisa.  Lisa had mentioned that the man who came to the office had a
silver automatic pistol, and Dina remembered being told by Dennis, the
police officer who asked Lisa not to fire Deidre, that Deidre carried a
silver automatic.) Other small things now seemed significant.  He
remembered a moment once when Lisa had confronted Kosta about being
seen with Deidre.  Kosta had explained that he had picked "them" up at
a bus stop and given "them" a ride home.  Now Dina remembered who
"them" was it had been Deidre and Teja.

All of this went through Dina's head while Lisa stared at the photo of
Teja and told Adamy she was sure that was the man.  And Dina was almost
certain of something else was Kosta was trying to kill Lisa.

Dina tried to keep cool.  He felt as if he were shaking all over, but
nobody seemed to notice.  Kosta had gone off to a corner of the room.

He seemed annoyed that Lisa had picked out Teja's photo.

The Suspicion "That's Teja," Dina said after Adamy had left.

Though he had been too stunned to tell the police everything, he now
tried to explain to Lisa who Teja was.  "The guy who worked at Joyland
for a while," he said, "the guy who hangs out at Top Shots."

Lisa didn't know Teja, but Kosta certainly did.  At first Kosta tried
to stonewall it.  "I don't know him," he said.  But soon he changed
strategies.  "Oh, yeah, Teja.

They call him T. J. Sure."  And then he insisted that Lisa should know
him.  "Teja," he said, "you know Teja.  He used to work at Joyland."

Dina knew what he had to do.  He certainly was not going to accuse
Kosta.  For one thing he couldn't prove it, and his accusations might
lead to another attempt on Lisa, or even on himself.  For another, if
Dina was wrong, he had to go on living with this man in his family
forever.

After the discussion had grown thin, Dina went quietly upstairs and
called his lawyer.  "I have to see you immediately," he said.  The
lawyer told him to come right over.

On the way out that morning Dina made a note of the plate number on
Kosta's BMW.  He also took plenty of cash with him.  He would pay the
lawyer in cash so there would be no written record of the visit.

If Dina turned out to be wrong, he didn't want Lisa to know he had
suspected her husband of trying to kill her.

It was 11:00 A.M. when Dina left the house to drive to his lawyer's
office, telling no one.  As he drove across the river that day and into
the sections of Daytona where few tourists go, he realized that there
had been something wrong about Kosta all along.

Dina's relationship with Kosta had not begun well.  He was against
Kosta before he even met him.  Kosta was, after all, some man who dared
to think he was good enough for Lisa.  Lisa was the light of Dina's
life, and in all likelihood Dina would have gotten off to a bad start
with any man who threatened to come between them.

Worse, the Kosta-Lisa romance seemed to go off almost in secret from
Dina, without his blessing, so to speak.

"The first time I met Kosta was the day Lisa got engaged to him, though
I didn't even know they were serious at the time.  I was living in
Tampa and they came over.  Until then I really had no idea she was
seeing this guy.  At one point when Lisa and I were alone, I said to
her, "Lisa, why don't you drop this guy?"  It wasn't that I had a bad
impression of him.  It was just that I didn't have a good impression of
him.  I didn't know him.  Mostly, I guess it was just that nobody was
good enough for my sister.  After Kosta and Lisa got engaged, the idea
of checking him out did cross my mind.  But then I thought, what if I
check him out and he finds out I checked him out.  That's not going to
get our relationship off to a great start."

As it happened the relationship did improve quickly, and In time Dina
grew to love his brother-in-law.  But the love that Dina felt for Kosta
was more the perfunctory sort of love that Dina knew he should feel for
anybody who was family.  Still, they became friends.

"We used to go wave running together," he says.  "I had Yamaha two-man
wave runner and we'd do that.  And of the things we did a lot was we'd
play this video game at Joyland called Cyberball.  It's football in the
twentieth century.  We'd each have a screen with our own robots on
it.

Sometimes I'd win, sometimes Kosta would win, but we always had a great
time playing it."

There were times, too, when Kosta's place in the family was perhaps
more than Dina would have liked.

"There were times," he says, "when I was kind of jealous of Kosta's
relationship with my father, the way they auld play cards and stuff.  I
remember one time the three of us were at Joyland moving games around
and I turned to Dad and said, "Why don't we do it this way, put this
here' and so forth.  Dad says, "No, no, Dina, I don't do that."  Then
he asked Kosta what he thought, and Kosta said the same thing and Dad
thought it was a great idea.

Well, that just blew me away.  I got upset and told them off.  I just
walked out.  I realized later it was just a missundersttanding The
Suspicion derstanding and my father didn't really understand what I had
been suggesting."

Dina's lawyer was a man by the name of Thomas Hall, a slim redheaded
Van Johnson lookalike who had gotten burned out as a high school
teacher and gone to law school.  His office on the west side of town
was small but welcoming.

"Dina," he said, "what can I do for you?"

Dina came in, sat down in a leather chair, leaned back and took a deep
breath.  Here it is, he thought.  This would be the first time he said
it out loud.

"It's my sister," he said.

"Oh.  How is Lisa?"

"I think her husband is trying to kill her."

The lawyer waited for more.

"Yesterday a guy assaulted Lisa with a gun," Dina said.

"He's a guy named Teja, they call him T. J a boardwalk guy."

Then Dina went into his story.  He told Hall about the affair with
Deidre, the Lori-to-Teja connection, the silver gun.  He told him about
all the insurance money that would fall into Kosta's hands if Lisa
died, about the fact that the marriage was troubled.  As he spoke, his
hands manically gesturing through the air, his thoughts came out in a
gush of words, and several times Hall had to tell him to slow down,
tell the story calmly.  There were tears in his eyes when he thought
how close Lisa had come to being killed.

As Dina told the story to the lawyer other things came back to him.  He
told Hall, for example, about the time he and Kosta had gone
shooting.

Kosta's love of guns had always troubled Dina.  Like his father and his
sister, Dina knew little and cared less about firearms.  He couldn't
really understand how a person could love weapons so much and spend so
much money on them.  Nonetheless he had gotten close to Kosta and he
knew that sharing his knowledge of weapons was important to Kosta, so
when Kosta had asked Dina if he wanted to go in the woods and shoot a
submachine gun, Dina had bone.  Besides, he thought, he had never fired
a gun of any kind, and it might be kind of exciting.

"We went out to the woods off Williamson, along a little street trail
on the other side of the highway from the gun range.  Kosta had what he
said was a registered Uzi and he told him it was okay, I wouldn't get
in trouble.  He shot he Uzi for a while and then he let me shoot it.  I
didn't really enjoy it.  We just shot at a bunch of bottles lined up in
front of a mattress or something.  But the strange thing was I would
stick near him and I would find an excuse not to be the one to go out
and set up new targets.  It didn't make any sense but I was afraid he
might shoot me, you know, and go home and say, "Oh, Lisa, I'm sorry,
but I accidentally killed Dina."  I didn't have anything to base this
and It was just intuition.  I guess I thought anybody who was shooting
an Uzi and loving it was dangerous."

Dina finished telling his story to the lawyer and took a Jeep breath.

"So that's what I think is going on.  I want you to get me a private
detective who can follow Kosta and and find out what's going on.  If
I'm wrong, and I hope to God I am, then none of us can ever mention it
again.  I haven't yet told Lisa.  I have to live with this guy."

Hall leaned back, thought it over.  Dina had been afraid that his
lawyer might just think he was hysterical, that there really was no
reason on earth to think that Kosta would be trying to kill Lisa.  But
now Hall wrung his hands together.  Clearly, he was troubled by what he
was hearing.

"You have a very serious problem here," Hall said.  "I'll tell you what
I'd like to do.  I'll ask around to see who is the best person in town,
okay.  I'll have somebody in abeynce, in case we need him.  But if you
hire somebody right aw you'll be jumping the gun.  If Kosta really just
tried to kill Lisa yesterday then he'd be foolish to try again in the
near future.  We'll hire a private detective, but we'll put him on hold,
okay?  He'll be just a phone call away."

"Okay," Dina said.  But he wasn't at all sure that things The Suspicion
were okay.  He would have to keep an eye on Kosta and Lisa himself.

This was the same day that Lisa had driven to Edgewater with Kosta, and
that evening when Lisa and Dina were alone Lisa told Dina about her
conversation during the drive.

"I said to Kosta, "How do I know you didn't try to kill me for the
insurance money."  You know, in a joking manner."

It was one of the few times that Dina blew up at his sister.

"Lisa, are you out of your mind?"

"What?  What are you talking about?"

Now Dina was stuck.  He didn't want to reveal his suspicions.

"Well .  . . well," he said, "what if Kosta really is behind this and
he knows you suspect him?"  He forced himself to smile, to make it all
a joke.

Lisa smiled back.  "If Kosta is behind this, then I'm as good as dead,"
she said.

For Lisa, the idea that Kosta was trying to kill her was still being
played at some safe and not quite real level of her mind.  It was,
after all, a thought too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

For Dina, that was not the case.  He took it very seriously.  But for
now, he would keep his silence.  To speak up without evidence might
cause Kosta to accelerate his plans.  Dina was scared.

The Shooting The next day, Friday, November 3, was the first day of the
Greek Festival, a time loaded with heavy emotions for the Paspalakis
family because it was during the festival that Steno had died two years
earlier.  Dina went to the festival, and later had a few drinks with
friends at Razzes.  As usual he'd had to shout to carry on a
conversation over the thumping music.  That and the haze of cigarette
smoke left his throat sore.  When he got home at one-thirty in the
morning Lisa and Kosta were still up, watching a cable TV movie with
Peter Kouracos.  Dina said his hellos, then went upstairs to watch a
different movie.  Shortly, he went to bed.  But, with so much on his
mind, he didn't sleep well.

At a little after four o'clock in the morning Dina woke up.  His throat
was still sore.  He was thirsty.  He decided to get up and go
downstairs for a glass of milk.

He walked down the front flight of stairs, and when he got to the main
floor he could see that the light in the stairway leading to the
basement was on.  When he got to the doorway he could see that the
lights in the basement were also on.  It was in the basement that Kosta
had set The Shooting aside a portion of the large recreation room as
his workshop.

There he tooled his guns and made his own bullets.

"Kosta," Dina called, thinking that Kosta must be down there making
bullets.  Nobody answered.  He walked downstairs, found nobody there,
and flipped the light switch to turn off the downstairs lights.

On his way up to the kitchen he turned off the stairway light.

When he got to the kitchen he turned a light on, but it bothered his
eyes so he turned it off immediately and poured his glass of milk by
the glow from the refrigerator.

He returned to the third floor by the formal staircase at the front of
the house.  Something about the lights being on troubled him.

Where is Kosta, he wondered.  Is he out of the house, working on some
plan?  On the third floor Dina walked into the guest bedroom, which
faces Halifax Avenue.  He stood there in the shadowy light, staring
down at the driveway.  His car was there, so was Kosta's car, and
Lisa's.  Everything was as it should be.  I'm just on edge, he thought,
and he went back into the bedroom with his glass of milk.

Fifteen minutes later he was in bed again, almost asleep, when he heard
noises.

When Dina had turned off the basement light Bryan Chase had been
waiting behind the house in the dark.

Bryan took the turning off of the light as his signal to come in.

At a little before five o'clock in the morning Bryan came to the
sliding glass door at the back of the house.  He smashed a brick
against one of the small windows near the door, either in a legitimate
attempt to enter the house through the window, or as a ruse to make it
appear that a burglar had come that way.  Around this time Kosta came
down the stairs, turned off the burglar alarm, let Bryan in through the
glass door, closed the door, and set the alarm once more.  The two men
perhaps waited in the dark for several minutes to make sure Dina was
asleep.

When the time was right the two men moved quietly up the back stairs,
Kosta leading the way.  They crept into the bedroom where Lisa lay
sleeping.  Kosta crawled in next to his wife.  He looked at Lisa, then
at Bryan.  He wanted to watch it happen.  Bryan, probably nervous,
probably shaking, pulled the .22 caliber pistol from his pocket.  He
moved very close to Lisa.  She was sleeping on her side, so he had to
aim the pistol into the side of her head from above.  He pulled the
trigger, firing a bullet that crashed into Lisa's skull and entered her
brain.  Immediately blood began pouring out of Lisa's head.  Bryan
pulled on the trigger 3gain.  The gun jammed.  He tried it once more.

Still the gun would not fire a second shot.  He shook the gun and
turned around and went to the door of the bedroom, as if he were going
to leave.  Then he came back and shook the gun some more.

As far as Kosta knew, Lisa was dead or dying.  And now was clear to
Kosta that Bryan would not be able to fire another round.  Kosta
reached under the bed.  He pulled out a loaded 9-millimeter,
semiautomatic Walther PPK pistal.  The light of early morning coming
through the windows was more than enough for him to take careful aim It
Bryan Chase and fire four bullets into the boy.

We know about Bryan's last minutes from Lori Bender"on's recollection
of what Kosta told her and Deidre later that morning.

"He just described how it happened," Lori says.  "He described in
detail, you know, about how he had unloaded the gun into him.  He was
kind of proud.  He was happy he had killed Bryan."

Lisa had been sleeping soundly.  She had stayed up late with Kosta and
Peter Kouracos, watching a movie on the VCR.  She and Kosta had
discussed their Key West trip, scheduled for the next day.  She had
gone to bed sometime after Dina came home, while Peter was still
there.

At 5

.M. she heard a noise and woke up momentarily.  Her head hurt and she
went immediately into a dream.  In her dream there was a judge, a huge
judge in black and he seemed angry.  He smashed down his gavel and it
made a terrifying BOOM.  Why was he so angry, Lisa wondered.

Down went the gavel again, crashing like thunder BOOMlts noise
resounding through her head.  It made a terrible pain in her head.  Why
doesn't he stop?  she thought, why doesn't he stop?  BOOM went the
gavel.  Her head hurt so much, and she thought if the judge would stop
banging his gavel then her head would not hurt.

BOOM went the gavel one more time.

"I woke up or opened my eyes," Lisa recalls, "and Kosta was standing
over me like in a crouched position with his arm around me or under me
crying his eyes out and I heard my mother in the background screaming,
"Oh my child, my child,' and just screaming at the top of her lungs.

And Kosta was crying and he was saying, "I'm going to kill him, I'm
going to kill him,' and I had no idea what happened.  And then the next
thing I know, my mom came into the room and Bryan Chase was lying on
the floor and she said "Who is this?"  and Kosta said something like,
"Well, that's the guy that shot Lisa."

"At that point I knew I was shot and I knew I was in shock and I
thought, What do I do?  Do I just lie here or do I come out of shock
and tell these people who I love and who love me, that I'm okay?  So I
came out of shock and I said, "I'm all right."  And I looked at Kosta
and I said, "Is it Teja?"  That's the only thing that made any kind of
sense, that Teja would try to kill me to stop me from identifying him
as the holdup man.  And Kosta said, "No, it's not Teja, it's Teja's
friend from Ohio, he must have hired him, I'm going to kill him, I'm
going to kill him."" For Dina, who was half asleep at the time, the
noise sounded not like a banging gavel but like fireworks.  To him it
was a constant bang, bang, bang, bang, and he woke up suddenly.  His
heart was pounding.  What the hell is going on?

he thought.

Wearing only his underwear, Dina ran into the hallway.

Lisa, he thought.  He charged toward Lisa's bedroom.

"Dina, call 911," Kosta shouted.  "Lisa's been shot."

Dina, thinking that the house was being fired on from outside, dove to
the floor of the hallway.  He crawled along the carpeting until he got
to the upstairs bathroom, which had a phone.  Still staying low he
reached up and yanked down the phone that sat on the bathroom sink.

He called 911.  "This is an emergency," he said.  "Someone is shooting
at us.  They're shooting at us, they're shoooting at us!  My sister's
been shot.  They're outside the house, shooting at us."  The dispatcher
asked Dina for the address and told him the police would be right
there.

When Dina hung up he ran into Lisa's bedroom.  "Lisa, Lisa," he
cried.

Don't die, he thought, don't die.

Lisa was lying in the bed, awake but dazed.  "My head hurts," she said,
"My head hurts."  There was blood on her pillow.

Then Dina saw the third person in the room.  A young man was lying on
the floor, slightly forward of the bed, a gun still clutched in his
hand.

"I saw a person on the floor with blood, and I remember feeling like
hitting this person," he says.

"Don't worry about him," Kosta said.  "He's dead."

Dina, still in his underwear, and now realizing that there were no
shooters outside, went back to the phone and callled 911 again.

"I told them there was a dead person and to send an ambulance for my
sister.  They told me to stay on the phone until the police arrived."

For Mary Paspalakis, fully asleep one floor below, the sound of
gunshots sounded like the slamming of a door.

"I heard boom, boom, boom, boom," she says.  "I got up and went to the
stairs and started yelling, "What's going on up there, kids, what's
going on?"  I thought it was doors hat were slamming.  Dina called down
to me, "Please go into your room and close the door because there is a
crazy person outside, firing shots inside."  I got scared and went
inside.  Then I thought, What am I doing here, my kids are getting
killed upstairs and I'm here.  So I got up.  I got outside my room
again, and I went upstairs.  Dina was calling the police.  I ran to
Lisa's room and I saw the man dead on the floor.  I thought it was a
rubber dummy, that Kosta was playing a joke.  I said, "What are you
doing?

What is this, a joke?"  Kosta was sitting there in his underwear
cradling Lisa and he was crying and he said, "No, no, no, they just
killed Lisa."  Then I saw the blood running down Lisa's forehead.  And
then I went nuts, I was screaming, "My child, my child.  Help me."  I
thought she was going to die any minute.  Then Lisa said, "Don't worry,
Mom, I'm okay, don't yell."" While they waited for the police to
arrive, Kosta cradled Lisa in his arms.  She felt thirsty, so he got
her a glass of water and helped her gently nurse it sip by sip.  There
were tears in his eyes.  He loves me, Lisa thought, he does love me.

When the police came Dina met them at the door.  They told him to come
out in the driveway and not reenter the house.  Not knowing exactly
what was going on, the police refused to go in until the others had
come out.  They gave Dina a bullhorn and in Greek he told his mother
and Kosta to come out of the house so that the paramedics could go in
and get Lisa.

Lisa recalls, "I was wide awake and somebody was coming in.  At first I
thought it was paramedics, but then I could see that it was
policemen.

They came in like something out of Miami Vice, pressed against the
wall, guns raised.  The police officer opened the door and he looked in
and shouted, "victim in bed, victim in bed."  Then, "somebody on the
floor, he's got a gun, he's got a gun."  They were being real cautious,
and I was calling to them, "Come on in, he's dead."

To me everything was so obvious, I didn't understand why they couldn't
see that he was dead.

"Finally the paramedics came rushing in.  I told them that my head hurt
and they put me on a stretcher that was so large it felt like a board
to me.  Then they put me in these shock pants, they were these big
things like giant bubbles.

said, "What do I need these for, I'm not in shock."  They said.

"Calm down, everything will be all right."  They told me not to move,
and when they picked me up my neck and head hurt.  So they taped my
head to the stretcher.

"When we came past my mother, she was screaming and crying.  One of the
paramedics said to her, "It's a miracle, "our daughter's alive."

The fact that Lisa had a bullet in her brain and was still alive and
alert was not a miracle; there have been many ugli cases.  It was,
however, extreme good luck.  Dr. Keith Wilson, author of Cause of
Death, says that a .22 caliber bullet fired in the back of the head
would be the "perfect weapon" that David Damore describes.  However,
Bryan Chase fired the gun into the side of Lisa's head, into an that
offers more chance for protection from the vital arts of the brain.

Wilson says, "A larger caliber bullet, like a forty-five, would have
been devastating from any direction.  It would have gone in one side of
Lisa's brain and out the other, almost certainly killing her.

But a twenty-two shot into the side of the head will expend most of its
energy going through the bone, so that it has very little velocity by
the time it gets inside.  The bullet would then settle either in the
fluid surrounds the brain or (as it did with Lisa) the temporal
parietol lobe, which is so densely fibered that a bullet could
penetrate the area without causing any permanent damage."

Dina, still wearing only underwear, stood in the driveway and watched
the ambulance take away his sister.  "The hospital," he said to one of
the police officers, "I've got to go to the hospital."

"Pretty soon," the cop told him.  "She'll be all right."

As soon as Lisa was out of the house a police videographer was sent in
to make a videotape of the entire house.

Dina and Kosta were given paraffin tests, to see if either had fired a
gun recently.

Kosta, of course, had fired a gun, as he explained to the police.

He had been awakened by the sound of a gunshot in the room, he told
them.  In the semidarkness he could see the young man who had shot his
precious Lisa in the head at close range.  Kosta, thinking that the
gunman would shoot again, reached under the bed for his gun and had
shot the young man four times, killing him.

It was an eminently reasonable story.  Kosta had done what any man
would have done.  Here was his wife, apparently dead beside him, and
her killer, still armed, hovered over the bed, perhaps preparing to put
a bullet into Kosta's head.  Kosta, it seemed, had done the only right
thing, and the police had no reason to think anything different had
gone on in the house.

But Dina knew better.

Kosta had arranged this murder attempt, he was sure of it.  Dina stood
out in the driveway in the shadows of early morning and watched in
amazement as his brother-in-law charmed the police with the heroic tale
of how he had avenged the shooting of his wife.  To Dina's eye Kosta
looked guilty as hell.  But he knew also that to a stranger Kosta
looked as innocent as could be.  This was not a man who was burdened
with guilt.  If his hands shook at all it was because his wife had just
been shot and he had just killed a boy.  If he seemed not as grief
stricken as he ought, it was because he was still in shock.  No, Dina
thought, the police aren't going to see right through Kosta.  I have to
catch him.  I have to stop him.

He scanned his memories for a clue, the proverbial forgotten detail
that would nail Kosta.  Suddenly an idea came to him.

"Can I make a request?"  he said to one policeman.  He explained about
his trip downstairs for a glass of milk.

"When I came up I turned the light switch off," he said.

"Can you take a fingerprint from the bottom of the switch to see who
turned it on?"  Dina was still somewhat dazed and confused, and
different scenarios of what had happened were able to reside in his
mind at the same time.  In this one, he was thinking that Kosta might
have turned on the light earlier to let the gunman in and then gone
back to bed while the gunman hid in one of the dark rooms before doing
his business.

In fact, a light switch is not sufficient surface to yield a usable
fingerprint, but neither Dina nor Kosta knew this at the time and to
Dina's eyes, Kosta's reaction was panic.

"No, no, Dina," Kosta said.  "That's okay, there's no need for that.  I
think.  . . I think I might have left the light on."

Can't you see it, Dina thought, can't you see how guilty he is?

But the police officers seemed to sense nothing.

Literally within minutes of Lisa's arrival at Halifax Memorial Hospital
the waiting rooms were swarming with anxious Greeks.  The word had gone
out over a telephone network.  Lisa's been shot.  Dina had gotten
dressed and called his friend Timmy.  Timmy's mother had called a few
people.  Each of them had called others and long before Lisa went into
surgery there were forty friends and relatives crammed into three
waiting rooms at the hospital.

Among this crowd of friends and family Dina felt lonely.

What they shared was a love and concern for Lisa, but alone possessed
the terrible knowledge that Lisa's own husband, a friend to all of
them, was trying to kill her.

He had tried to tell a few of them, but it was only making "liings
worse.

"At the house my uncle Stacy had come over while the police were
questioning me and I had taken him aside and told him, "Look, it's
Kosta who's trying to kill Lisa,' and I told him the whole thing about
Deidre and Teja and the holdup.  And he said, "Dina, you're delirious,
that's crazy.

He didn't believe me.  So I told him, "Look, whether you believe me or
not, don't repeat what I just told you."  By the time Dina was at the
hospital he understood that it was best not to share his suspicions
with his Greek family and friends.  He loved them all, but he also knew
how much they loved to talk, and if he told them what he thought, it
would only be a matter of minutes before it got back to Kosta.  Kosta,
he knew, would laugh it off and then kill Dina to shut him up.  When
Dina saw his aunt Joyce, his uncle Stacy's sister, he told her what he
had told Stacy and said, "Make sure Stacy doesn't repeat it.  I'm
putting on a facade with Kosta and I don't want him to know I know."

Now Dina set about the more urgent business of protecting his sister.

He roamed about the hectic hospital from policeman to policeman.  "I
want twenty-four hour protection for my sister," he said.  He was
almost crying.  "I want a police officer watching her at all times."

He did not mention Kosta.  He presented the reasonable argument that
she had been held up by a gunman barely thirty-six hours ago and it
appeared that somebody was trying to kill her.  The police couldn't
promise anything.

"Okay, if you don't think she needs it, I'll pay for it," he told
them.

"Just give her the protection.  I'll pay for it."

Still, he couldn't seem to get anyone to say, "Yes, Dina, she will be
protected."

"But then this woman investigator came over to me," he says.  "Her name
was Allison Ebel.  I said, "Look, are you an investigator on this
case?"  She said, "Yes,' so I pulled her aside into a hallway where
nobody could hear us.  "It's Kosta,' I told her.  "It's Kosta, he's
trying to kill my sister."  I told her everything.  I said if I'm wrong
then I don't want to be quoted on this.  She said she would see what
she could do.  Then later when I got home she called me up.

"Dina,' she said, "you got your protection."

They were going to shave her head.  Lisa was still confused by
everything that had happened, but she was no longer in shock, and that
much she understood.  They were going to shave her head.  Oddly enough,
this disturbed her more than the fact that she had been shot and the
bullet was still in her brain.

Looking straight up at the ceiling because it hurt to move, she lay on
a gurney in the emergency room at Halifax Memorial Hospital.

"Kosta," she called.

Kosta was right there, just beyond her view.  Now he came into her
field of vision, blocking out the light above her.  "I'm here,
darling," he said.  He smiled nervously, took her hand.

"Kosta, don't let them shave my head."

"They have to," he said.

"But my hair, my hair."

She knew it must sound ridiculous, even vain, worrying about her hair
at a time like this, but it seemed important.

It was something she could concentrate on.  She remembered the times
when people had complimented her on her hair, the times when men had
found her sexy.  She had never been particularly flirtatious, but still
it was nice to be considered sexy.  I wonder how sexy they'll find me
when I look like Telly Savalas, she thought now.

Though the pain was like an anvil pressed on her head, she smiled.

She had always been able to make jokes in her mind, even in the worst
of times.

"I'm going to look like a bald lady in one of those science fiction
movies," she said to Kosta.  It was an image that revolted her.

Kosta squeezed her hand.  "You'll look fine," he said.

"Just fine."

"Why, Kosta?"  she cried.  "Why do they have to do this?"

"You have a hole in your head," Kosta said.  "They have to operate."

"Well, why can't they just shave a little section, where the hole
is?"

"Huh?"  Kosta said.  He seemed to be thinking about something else.

"Oh.  They can't."  He squeezed her hand again.  It was small comfort,
but at least he was trying.

"Bacteria or something.  If anything got in the hole it could infect
your brain."

"A bullet in my brain," Lisa said.  "I can't believe it."

"It's a twenty-two."

"Huh?"

"A twenty-two," Kosta said.  "A small caliber."  He seemed so proud of
his knowledge of guns.  "That's what the mob uses for hits," he said.

"It's a small bullet but it will rattle around inside the head.  Do a
lot of damage."

"Oh, great," Lisa said.  She was not afraid.  But she was thirsty.

The headache was awful.  Lisa had been asking for a Tylenol, but nobody
would give her one.

"What time's breakfast?"  she asked.

"Don't worry about that now, honey.  You have to go through surgery
first."

"How about a cigarette?"  she said now.

Kosta frowned.  "No," he said.  Lisa knew he had never approved of her
smoking, but here in the emergency room, the idea must have seemed
absurd to him.  Where's Timmy, she thought, he'll give me a
cigarette.

Or Thea Anna, she smokes.  Earlier Lisa had asked a nurse for a
cigarette and the nurse had curtly informed her that smoking was not
allowed.  "Well, then take me somewhere else," she had joked, but her
humor had not been appreciated.  Now, she thought, Kosta could be a
little more sensitive to a woman with a bullet in her brain than simply
grunting "no," to her request.  What a grouch.  But then she remembered
that it was Kosta who had saved her life, and she felt bad.

Kosta really loves me, she thought.  Maybe he had an affair with Deidre
and maybe he didn't, but he really, really loves me.  She remembered
how Kosta had held her after she was shot, how he had hawed like a
baby, how he had sworn he would kill Teja for doing this to her.

She had never seen such emotion from her husband, and just thinking
about it now brought tears to her eyes.  "Kosta," she said.

"Things will get better.  I love you."

He smiled down at her.  She could see that he was terribly troubled by
this tragedy.  But he smiled.  He leaned down and kissed her cheek.  "I
love you, too, sweetheart," he said.

There are three waiting rooms in the intensive care unit at Halifax and
by this time all three were crowded with people who had come about
Lisa.  The doctor had assured them all that Lisa had a 95 percent
chance of living, but had warned them, too, that personality change or
memory loss was a real possibility.  Many of them wept openly.  All of
them were more concerned than Lisa was.  At one point Lisa told one of
the cousins to send Thea Anna to her.

When Anna heard this she went rushing madly down the hospital corridor
where Lisa lay on the gurney.  "Lisa, Lisa," she cried, thinking her
niece wanted to say something to her before she died.

Lisa looked up.  "Thea Anna," she said.  "I have to ask you
something."

"Oh, Lisa?"  Thea Anna cried.  "Oh, Lisa."

"Do you have a cigarette?"  Lisa asked.

When Kosta had gone to talk with the others, and calm them down, it was
Dina who stayed with Lisa then.  Dina held her hand and hawed even as
he assured her that everything was going to be all right.  She told him
how gentle Kosta had been and all Dina could do was smile falsely and
tell her that was good.  This was no time to tell his sister that her
husband was trying to kill her.

"She was talking intelligently the whole time," Dina recalls.  "I held
her hand, telling her how confident I was that she would make it and I
was bawling.  I was scared, but I was confident she would make it.

There were fifty people in the three waiting rooms.  They kept coming,
one person right after another, the cousins and the aunts were
bawling.

At 8:00 A.M. they took Lisa onto the elevator to bring her up to
surgery.  As soon as Lisa was in surgery, Kosta left.

Kosta had gone to Deidre's house.  Deidre and Lori, who had driven by
Lisa's house early in the morning and seen the police cars, were
waiting for him, expecting to be told that Lisa was dead.  It was then
that Kosta described how he had killed Bryan Chase and how Lisa had sat
up in bed after being shot.

"He said she just sat up and looked at him," Lori says.

"She had just been shot.  Kosta couldn't believe it.  He was
disappointed that she wasn't dead."

Deidre Hunt remembers Kosta bragging about how he murdered Bryan.

"Kosta just emptied the gun into him.

He said he made him meatloaf and laughed."

Deidre also says that Kosta wanted the hospital blown up.  "He was
mad," she says.  "He wanted her dead, even in the hospital."

Deidre says that Kosta ordered her to have Teja place a bomb in a
flower pot to be sent to Lisa's room, or sneak in explosives made from
detergent and gasoline and put them under her bed.

While Kosta may, indeed, have given such orders, Lori Henderson
remembers that it was Deidre who beat the drums most loudly for a bomb
plan.

"Dee was making plans for blowing up the hospital.

After Lisa finally got shot, and still didn't die, I think Dee kind of
lost it.  She had gotten completely infatuated with it all and she was
just planning that this person has to die, and that person has to
die.

J. R because he knew about it.  Mike Cox, because he knew about it.

And Teja has got to do this, she said, he has to go to the hospital and
blow it up.  I tell you, she got really crazy."

Twelve hours later Lisa was alone, and the belief that Kosta really
loved her was dying fast.  Kosta did this to me, she thought.

She lay, still dazed and confused as she rose gradually from the
drug-induced sleep.  She felt as if she were being pulled up from the
bottom of a pond.  They had explored her brain and decided not to
remove the bullet.

"We'll leave it in," the doctor had said to her during the day when she
was half awake.  "We'll keep an eye on it.

If it shifts we might have to go in there and take it out some day."

Now it was quiet in the dimly lit intensive care unit.

Kosta did this to me, she thought again.  It was Saturday night and she
could remember that she had had visitors on Saturday afternoon but she
couldn't remember who they were or what was said.  Kosta did this to
me.  The facts add up.  Deidre is his girlfriend.  Lori is her
girlfriend.  Teja is Lori's boyfriend.  Teja tried to kill me.  My gun
was not in my desk drawer.  The insurance money.  He was afraid I would
divorce him and leave him with nothing.  Kosta did this to me.

It was an unacceptable thought.  She pushed it away and thought,
instead, about the candy apples that her grandfather used to make.

When she was a little girl her grandfather would come from Greece and
stay for two or three months at a time.

Each night the dining room table would be covered with fat bags of
apples, and Lisa would fall asleep with the smell of apples filling the
house.  Grandpa would stay up almost all night, and when Lisa awoke in
the morning there they would be, rows and rows of bright red taffy
apples on the table, on the kitchen counter, everywhere.  Steno would
take the taffy apples to the boardwalk and sell them at the snack
bar.

Kosta did this to me.  My own husband tried to have me murdered.

No, she thought.  She didn't want to have to face this.

She thought about her father.  Those days at the beach when she was a
little girl.  "The Atlantic Ocean," he had said, holding her on his
shoulders, and she thought she could see all the way to Greece.

The car noises he made, "Vroom, z'room, " when he told her about the
races.

The man I love is trying to kill me, she thought.  The thought kept
returning and each time it grew heavier and harder to push away.

No, she thought, the facts are deceiving.  It's Deidre who is behind
all of this, she's doing it behind Kosta's back.  Yes, Deidre.

But Lisa knew it wasn't Deidre.  She knew.

She tried to focus on other things.  Cousins, old boyfriends,
business.

But it kept coming back to her that she was lying in bed with a bullet
in her head.  There is a bullet in my brain.  A bullet that should have
killed me.  I should be dead, she thought.  And that's the way my
husband wanted it.

That boy, she thought, that boy who came into my room.

He's dead.  Kosta murdered him.  Murdered.  What an incredible
thought.

Lisa could feel the thoughts were coming faster, making more sense.

Murder was supposed to be something you heard about on the late news.

Two people in Orlando were found murdered tonight.  Or even, once in a
while, the body of a Daytona Beach man, missing since last week, was
found in the trunk of a car near the Halifax River early this
afternoon.  But never was murder something that happened in your own
house, committed by your own husband.  She was shaking off her sense of
fogginess.  Soon she would be completely awake.

She thought about Kosta, all the cuteness over the years, her funny
little Rambo boy burying things in the woods, reading his comic books,
collecting his guns.  He had always been so adorable.  She went over
everything, the courtship, the wedding, the good times and bad,
thinking that if she just played it all back enough times she would see
this terrible tragedy coming at her.  She would find a clue.  But the
clues only made sense after you knew the truth, and the truth was that
she had married a monster.

The facts add up, she thought, the facts add up.  Everything was
becoming clear, too clear.  Suddenly her eyes opened.

She was awake.  In the dark she could see everything.

"Oh God," she said out loud.  "Oh God, oh God, oh God."

She sobbed for a long time before she fell asleep again.

On Saturday afternoon Dina drove back to the house with several friends
and cousins.  The near death of his sister and the knowledge of what
was really going on weighed heavily on him and he needed the support of
friends, even if he could not tell them everything.  Kosta was there,
looking properly distressed.  Dina showed the group the small window in
back, which supposedly was the point of entry for Bryan Chase.  The
window was barely big enough for a child to get through.

It was clear to Dina that the window had been broken for appearances
only and that Kosta had probably opened the door for Chase.

Though the house alarm had gone off when Dina had opened the door for
the police after the shooting, it was Dina's belief that Kosta had
turned off the alarm to let Chase in and had turned it back on again
afterward.  And, in fact, that probably is what happened.  But now, on
Saturday afternoon, Dina said nothing about Kosta's involvement, just
pointed to the window and hoped that what was so obvious to him would
become obvious to others.

"A few years earlier somebody really had come through one of those
windows and burglarized the house," Dina says.  "It must have been a
kid or somebody very small.  So when I was showing it to people on
Saturday afternoon I mentioned that fact and Kosta goes, "Oh yeah,
that's right,' as if he had completely forgotten that.  It seemed very
suspicious to me that he had forgotten it, because it was such an
unusual way to enter a house, that nobody would forget it.  I figured
Kosta decided to make it look as if somebody had used the small window
because the previous break-in would give that scenario credibility."

Also on Saturday Dina asked his friend Jimmy Walls to do some spying.

Walls had been friendly with Kosta, and could hang around at Top Shots
without unnerving Kosta.

Dina and Walls devised an elaborate set of signals to make sure their
communications were not heard by Kosta.  Dina, when he was visiting
Lisa at the hospital during the next few days, would call into Walls's
beeper, and leave a code number to indicate it was him.  Then he would
go take the elevator up to another floor of the hospital to receive the
call from Walls, who would report any news.  Though in retrospect this
method of communicating might seem a bit dramatic, it was at the time
no more than reasonable caution.  Then, none of the innocent people
really knew what was going on.  Kosta Fotopoulos was, after all, the
proud owner of submachine guns, hand grenades, and various other
firepower, so the idea of him directing spies and planting wiretaps was
not far-fetched.

By dark on Saturday the cousins and friends had gone.

Now it was just Dina, Mary, and Kosta, in the house.  They watched the
TV news.  Every station carried the story of Lisa Fotopoulas, local
businesswoman, who had been shot by a burglar, who, in turn, had been
killed by Lisa's husband, Kosta.  Dina watched in silence, waiting for
some hint that somebody somewhere thought there was more to the story
than it seemed.  But there was nothing.

As the evening wore on Dina became more and more tense.  He and Mary
would have to spend the night in the house with a man who was capable
of murder, and yet he could in no way indicate that he feared Kosta.

If Kosta knows that I know, Dina thought, he will kill us for sure.

Though Dina didn't know about Kevin or any of Kosta's other videotapes,
he had seen the body of Bryan Chase on the bedroom floor.

He knew that Kosta could kill.

The family of three ate supper together.  Lisa's absence seemed to
leave a hole in the room and there were moments of excruciating
silence.

After supper Dina stood in the kitchen and watched his mother as she
methodically washed dishes and put them away.  She seemed to lose
herself in her chores, trying to Push away thoughts of her daughter.

Already Dina sensed that the events of the early morning had damaged
his mother in ways difficult to see.  The intrusion into her house, the
violence to her family, had shaken her trust in strangers, had ignited
in her new fears.  She seemed, even in the smallest movements, to be
somehow more cautious, more fearful that something could strike her
suddenly.

How will she take it, Dina wondered, when she knows that the violence
to her family came from within her family.

What would she say when she learned that the man who had tried to kill
her daughter was her beloved son-in-law?

He dreaded the moment when he would have to tell her.

Just then his mother turned to him.  "Dina," she said, "I've been
thinking.  You should sleep with Kosta tonight."

"Kosta?"  Dina said.  What an incredible thought.  It was like
something out of a Woody Allen movie.

"He needs you," Mary said.  "He's sad.  His Lisa is in the hospital."

It took some doing, but Dina convinced his mother that sleeping with
Kosta was not the best thing.

"I should sleep in your room," he told her.  "I'll be there to protect
you if anything happens."

Still, Dina said not a word about Kosta being the villain.

He had adopted the viewpoint that Teja was behind the attempt on Lisa,
and that Teja or one of his cohorts, might come in the night.

"Kosta," he explained, "can protect himself."

By bedtime on Saturday Dina was a wreck.  He had no way to protect
himself if Kosta appeared with a gun during the night.  What could he
do, throw a lamp at Kosta?  How much protection could he really give
his mother or himself from a man who had more guns than Dirty Harry?

The answer, he knew, was none.  He and Mary would be as helpless as
deer in the forest if Kosta decided to come for them.  As he thought on
this, Dina thought also that he needed to show Kosta that he believed
there was somebody outside of the house who had tried to kill Lisa.  If
Dina didn't act properly apprehensive about outside dangers, then Kosta
might realize that Dina suspected him.

Then it came to Dina that there was a way to solve both problems.

He would borrow a gun from Kosta.

Kosta was in the television room watching the usual shoot-em-up action
fare.  Dina sat down beside him on the couch.

"Kosta, can I interrupt you for a minute?"

"Sure," Kosta said.  He aimed the remote like a pistol and turned off
the sound on the TV.

"I've been thinking about Teja," Dina said.

"That son of a bitch," Kosta said.  "I've been thinking about him,
too.

If I catch that black bastard I'll kill him."

"He's dangerous," Dina said.  "I think he's behind this thing."

Kosta smiled.  He patted Dina's shoulder.  "I think you're right," he
said.

"Look, I'm a little scared," Dina said, "and I was wondering.  . .

do you think I could borrow a gun, just for the night?"

If he doesn't give it to me, I'm in trouble, Dina thought.

If he doesn't give me a gun it means he wants me unarmed, so he can
come in and shoot me.

Kosta smiled.  "Sure, Dina, sure."  He left the couch and walked out of
the house.  A minute later he came back with the gun from Lisa's car.

He waved the gun at Dina.  "This will protect you," he said.

Standing in the living room, next to Dina, Kosta then unloaded the gun
and reloaded it with bullets from his pocket.

The son of a bitch is putting in blanks, Dina thought.

He's filling it with blanks and he's doing it right in front of me.

He handed Dina the gun.  "You know how to use it?"

"I think so," Dina said.  "I think so."

"Good," Kosta said.  He patted Dina on the back.

All night long Dina stayed awake.  He lay, fully dressed, in his
mother's bedroom, his heart thumping madly with every sound.  He had
the door padlocked on the inside, and the gun lay on a night table just
inches away.  Now and then he would grab for the gun to see how quickly
he could get it into his hand.  He felt as if he were drawing down on
Shootin' Sam at Joyland.  Let's hope my aim's a little better now, he
thought.  Being what he calls "gun illiterate," Dina had no way of
figuring out if the bullets in his weapon were blanks.  (Later he
showed the bullets to Officer Allison Ebel and she assured him that
they were live rounds.  In fact, Kosta, for whatever reason, had
replaced the old bullets with a more deadly type.) Mary Paspalakis,
knowing only that her daughter had been shot by a stranger, finally
fell asleep about 2:00 A.M. and Dina could hear the soft sounds of her
breathing.

By dawn, just before he fell asleep, Dina decided that he could not go
through this again.  His mother would have to sleep at a relative's
house.  The only way he could get her to do that, he knew, would be to
tell her the awful truth.

On Sunday morning Dina went out early to get the News Journal,
Daytona's newspaper.  The top story: HUSBAND KILLS INTRUDER, WIFE
WOUNDED IN SHOOTING AT oN.  HALIFAX HOME.

Dina had expected the shooting to make the papers, but he was shocked
to see it in big bold headlines, the top story of the day.

The story, by News Journal reporter William D. A. Hill, began, "An
18-year-old intruder is dead and a prominent Halifax Avenue
businesswoman is in serious condition after a shooting in the woman's
home early Saturday morning, police reported."

The article went on to recount Kosta's story about being awakened by a
loud noise, seeing the intruder, and shooting him.  The front page also
carried a photograph of Bryan Chase's body being taken out of the
house.  Dina took the paper home, wondering how many people in Daytona
Beach would see right through it.  How many would know what he knew.

Later that morning Dina drove his mother to the hospital to visit with
Lisa.

"We were driving along," Dina says, "and I turned to her and I said,
"Ma, there's something I got to tell you.

There's a good chance Kosta is involved in all of this.  So we can't
sleep in the house."  But she refused to accept it.

She started yelling at me.  "No, no, Kosta wouldn't do that to Lisa."

She kept saying, "You're going to kill your sister, telling her a thing
like this."  And I kept saying, "Well, I'd rather have her die from
hearing this than from being shot by Kosta, or from hearing that you
and I were murdered in our beds by her husband."  But she just wouldn't
believe me.  I told her, I said, "Look, Ma, you have to sleep at Thea
Loulas' tonight.  Kosta doesn't know where she lives."  And my mother,
she kept saying, "No, we will sleep at home,' and I'd say, "No, you're
sleeping at Thea Loulas' and we went back and forth like that.

"But when we got to the hospital, all her friends were there waiting to
see Lisa, and I guess they must have suspected something because they
all said to my mother, "Mary, you do what your son tells you, you don't
sleep in that house,' and I guess then it started to sink in for her
that it really was true and she cried."

Later that day Dina drove back to the house with Kosta in the BMW, to
take a break from the hospital while other people visited with Lisa.

Along the way Dina brooded about what was happening, most intensely
about the fact that Kosta had sat by Lisa's hospital bed and held her
hand.  He held her hand, Dina thought.  He had the nerve to hold her
hand.  Somehow, it seemed to Dina, that this was the greatest
violation, for Kosta to sit there and act like the loving husband after
what he had done.  It had disturbed Dina so much that he had left the
room.  Now as they drove along, he took deep breaths to calm himself.

His emotions, he would later say, were fighting it out with his
intelligence.  Intellectually, everything pointed to Kosta.

Emotionally, Dina didn't want it to be true.  He wrote scenarios in his
mind that would somehow explain everything and leave Kosta innocent.

But it was difficult.  Still, even now, with all this anger broiling
inside of him, he would give Kosta the benefit of the doubt.

Allowing for what he thought of as "the five percent chance that Kosta
is not involved," he turned to his brother-in-law.

"Kosta," he said, "I went to the police."

Kosta turned his head quickly to Dina, then back to the road.

"I told them everything that I know about the Teja-Lori/Deidre
connection," Dina said.

"Oh," Kosta said.  He nodded his head up and down.

"That's good."

Dina studied Kosta for more of a reaction, some proof that he
definitely was a murderer or definitely wasn't.

"You know more about these people than I do," Dina said.

"So?"

"Well.  You ought to go to the police."  He paused.  "And tell them
what you know."

Kosta stared out at the road.  He pulled a hand from the steering
wheel, reached across his chest, and patted the spot where his pistol
was holstered.

"I'm going to take care of it myself," he said.

"Take care of it yourself?"  Dina said.  "For God's sake, Kosta, this
isn't some Rambo movie.  You don't take care of it yourself.  You go to
the police and you tell them everything you know and you let them take
care of it."

Kosta just smiled.  It was a smile Dina knew well.  It meant, I, Kosta,
know what's best, and you know nothing.

(Apparently, Kosta really did plan to "take care of it" himself.

According to Peter Kouracos, he and Kosta drove around Daytona looking
for Teja one night after the shooting.  Though Kouracos makes no
mention of Kosta's intentions, he does note, "We were both armed.") In
fact, Dina, through Allison Ebel, had begun to keep in frequent contact
with the police, who by this time were leaning toward the theory that
Kosta was guilty.  Dina's suspicions resonated with a few of their
own.

Why, they wondered, would a burglar walk through a house full of
valuable objects to enter a bedroom and shoot a sleeping woman?

Furthermore, if the burglar was going to shoot someone, why the
woman?

Why not shoot the man, who was bigger and stronger, a much more serious
threat?  Their own investigation was leading them quickly to the same
conclusion that Dina had made: Kosta had engineered his wife's
shooting.  Dina was helping the police by keeping a small spiral
notebook in which he wrote everything he heard or remembered about
Kosta that might be helpful.

By Sunday night the Jimmy Walls operation was beginning to show signs
of success.  Kosta, it seemed, was no less paranoid than Dina about
wiretaps.  Walls reported that Deidre was receiving calls from Kosta at
Top Shots.

She would speak briefly, than saunter over to a pool table and shoot a
rack, before discreetly walking out to the boardwalk, where she would
then place a call, presumably to Kosta, on the coin-operated phone.

Dina, of course, didn't know what was being said, but all the secrecy
didn't do much for the "five percent chance that Kosta is innocent"
theory.

During this time there was one other surprising source of information
that Dina entered in his notebook.  An older black man seemed to be in
the intensive care unit waiting room all the time.  He slept on the
bench while his wife was in the hospital.  On Sunday morning as Dina
was walking by the elevator the old black man waved him on.  When the
door was closed the black man looked at him conspiratorially.

"Be careful," he said.

"Huh?"

"Be careful," he said.  "Your brother-in-law came looking for you at
three in the morning."

"Oh," Dina said.  He had no idea what he was dealing with.  Was this
man some friend of Kosta's?  Was it some sort of trick?

"He calls her, you know," the black man said.

"Who?"

"Deidre," the man said.  "He calls Deidre."

During this time theories about who wanted to kill Lisa were not hard
to come by.  There was, of course, the Teja theory.  There was a
theory, put forth by one of the newscasters who haunted the hospital
corridors, that someone high up at the Marriott was trying to kill
Lisa, the same theory that Kosta had spouted to Lisa on the drive to
Edgewater.  It was an absurd idea, but not as absurd as the one that
Kosta put to Dina in the hospital on Monday morning.

A few weeks before the shooting there had been a meeting at which a
local political appointee by the name of George McGee stood up and made
disparaging remarks about Greeks.  Specifically, he accused the Greek
gift shop owners of having no taste.  Their gift shops, he said, were
too cluttered.  "That's how Greeks are," he said.  "I been to Greece
and it's the same thing, everything is cluttered."

The comment had caused a small uproar in the Greek community, and days
later McGee was obliged to publicly apologize.  Lisa led the lobbying
to make McGee apologize.

Now, on the Monday mornIng after the shooting, November 6, Kosta came
up to Dina in a corridor at the Halifax memorial Hospital and said, "I
know who is behind this."

"You do?"  Dina said, thinking, I'll just bet you do.  Dina was trying
to get out of the building, but he didn't want to stir Kosta's
curiosity about where he was going, because he had an appointment to
see a private detective.

"It's not just me who thinks this," Kosta said.  "A lot of people are
thinking the same thing."

"Who?"

"George McGee," Kosta said.

Dina couldn't believe what he was hearing.  The idea was so
preposterous that he was embarrassed for Kosta for even saying it.

"George McGee?"  Dina shouted.  "George McGee?"  All his rage he'd been
holding in now erupted.  "Kosta, what the fuck is the matter with
you?

What do you think, McGee tried to kill my sister because her gift shop
is too cluttered?

George McGee."

Kosta said nothing.  Dina kept shouting.  "It wasn't George McGee,
goddamnit, and it wasn't the Marriott and wasn't Teja.  We know who it
was, don't we?  We know."

Jaw he was screaming and shaking his fists and crying all once.

"I'm getting out of here," he said.  He headed for the door.  Then he
turned and shook a fist at his brother-in-law.  "I want you out of my
house by tonight.  Take all our stuff and your goddamn guns and just
.

. just get out."  He wanted to walk back and lunge at Kosta and just
beat the hell out of him for trying to kill Lisa.  But there was
another more prudent part of him thinking, Watch it, mo, this guy's a
fucking psycho, he carries a gun.  "Just leave us alone," Dina said and
he stormed out of the hospital.

By eleven o'clock Dina was in the office of a private detective.  "I
want Kosta watched," he told the PI, thinking that if he'd hired a
detective on Thursday when he wanted to, by now Fotomart could have
processed a dozen glossy double prints of Kosta meeting Bryan Chase and
maybe even handing him a gun or something.  The private detective told
Dina to save his money.  The police were on it, he said, and they will
solve it.  "But if I had to bet money," he said, before Dina left his
office, "I'd bet that Kosta is behind this and he's hired other people
through Deidre to keep himself clean."

From there Dina went to the bank, where he had Kosta's name removed
from the company accounts, so that Kosta couldn't cash a check and fly
to Greece.  Dina also changed his will, taking Kosta's name off of
it.

During these days Dina's closest confidant was his friend Timmy
Kostidakis.  Timmy had known Dina forever.  They used to play
basketball together.  In more recent times Timmy had been part of a
crowd of Paspalakis cousins, both real and nominal, who would get
together on Friday evenings and play small stakes poker.  Kosta would
join in these sessions, too, but Timmy had never found him sociable.

Dina had turned to Timmy for advice as early as Thursday, after his
visit to the lawyer.  He had met Timmy that night and told him what was
going on.  Timmy, like Dina, was anxious to give Kosta the benefit of
the doubt, but it did not look good.  On Saturday morning after the
shooting, Timmy was the first person Dina had called, and he came right
over.  Throughout Saturday and Sunday it was Timmy that Dina called
constantly to hold himself together.

After that first harrowing night in the house, sleeping in his mother's
room with the loaded gun, Dina started sleeping in Lisa's guarded room
at the hospital.  He slept there on Sunday night and Monday night.

On Tuesday night Dina met at the police station with police and
investigators from the state attorney's office.

Surrounded by law enforcement officers he again told everything he knew
and suspected.  He told them about Kosta and Deidre's affair, about
Teja being Lori's boyfriend, and Lori being Deidre's girlfriend.  He
told them about the window, the insurance, the downstairs light, the
phone calls at Top Shots.  Though Dina was unaware of it, by this time
the police knew a good deal more about the case.  In fact, one of the
things that the police knew that )mo didn't know was that Kosta had
bragged to boardwalk friends that he had murdered Steno Paspalakis.

When the discussion was over that evening, Bob Wheeler, the hief
investigator for the state attorney's office, and Mike olitis, another
investigator who was also a cousin to >mo (many friends in the Greek
community are called cousins, even when they're not related) went to
the hospital.

"We had to go to Lisa's room separately," Dina explains.

Because if Kosta was there, or any of his spies, it would of been good
to have me seen with investigators."

That night the investigators told Dina and Lisa that Kosta would be
arrested for murder.

The police investigation of the Fotopoulas case was the most highly
publicized in Daytona Beach history.  It began on that Saturday
morning, November 4, when officer John Slayin was told to go to 2505

North Halifax.

"I had received information that there was a shooting and I supposed
the shooter was still in the house," he says.

Slavin, who was soon joined by officers in other cruisers, lit up the
house with the spotlight from his car and ordered everybody outside.

That's when Dina rushed out in his underwear and had a bullhorn shoved
in his hand, so he could tell his mother and Kosta to come outside.

"He said that his sister had been shot and that his brother-in-law had
shot a guy.  He wanted me to go in.  We went through the foyer and up
the larger staircase.  At the top of the staircase there is a bedroom
door facing you.  I didn't know if the shooter was still in there.  I
inched my way in.  There was a lady lying in bed.  She looked at me.

She said something like, "He's over there and I think he's dead."

I was able to see an individual lying on the floor, head facing east.

He had something in his hand, I couldn't tell what.  At this point I
didn't know that this fellow had expired.  I had no idea who he was.

I shined the flashlight on his hand.  It was a gun.  I removed it from
his hand.  We brought in the paramedics.  I said to the woman, "You're
going to be all right."" Detective Charles Evans and Corporal Gregg
Smith, from the Criminal Investigations Division (CID), came to the
house.  Like the others, they sensed that the broken window, the dead
burglar, and the hero husband did not add up to a solved case.

Something had happened in the house other than what appeared to have
happened.  They drove to the Desert Inn Hotel, where David Chase,
Bryan's father, worked.  They told Chase that his son had been shot to
death.  They asked Chase about Bryan's last days.  Chase said his son
had gone to bed early the night before, and he had never seen him
again.  He told them about the visits from the two young women, and how
Bryan had been moody lately.  He told them Bryan had gone out early
that morning and left a note by the coffee pot saying he'd be home
later.  He told them that Bryan had always been a good kid .

The police searched Bryan's room but found nothing that could be used
as evidence.

Meanwhile, Mary Paspalakis's house was being invaded by a team of crime
lab technicians from Orlando.  Of most interest to them was the window
at the back of the house.

David Damore, who would eventually prosecute the case, says he is
fairly certain that Kosta, after turning on the television loudly
enough to drown out the noise of breaking glass, turned off the house
alarm and let Bryan in the sliding glass door at the back of the
house.

However, the findings of the lab technicians do allow for other
,cenarios.

"The evidence is not conclusive that Bryan Chase actually made it
through the window, or didn't," Damore says.

"There are two theories available.  One is that Bryan Chase was able to
make it through the window and, with the knowledge that Kosta had given
him, found his way to the bedroom.  The other is that Kosta had shut
off the burglar alarm and opened the door for Bryan and walked him to
the bedroom.

"Bryan was fairly stocky, 178 pounds, and it would be difficult to get
through that window.  But we did find glass on his clothes.  If we
assume that he kicked the glass, there would have been a spray, known
as blowback, that would have left glass on him.  It's also possible
that he tried to get through the window, but couldn't fit through.

Maybe at that point Kosta came to help him in.  That would explain the
glass on him."

On Saturday night a 911 call came into Daytona police headquarters from
a young man who was in a phone booth.  He said he knew what really had
happened at the Fotopoulas house.  While the young man was on the phone
a police car was sent to detain him at the phone booth.

Evans and Smith went to pick him up.  It was J. R. The two officers
took J. R. to the police station and taped an interview.  They hoped
J.

R. could lead them to Teja, who was still at large, but J. R.

said he didn't know where Teja was.  By this time the "Teja hired Bryan
to kill Lisa" theory, which had never been strong to begin with, had
been pretty much abandoned.  J. R. had good reason for blowing the
whistle on Kosta.  Bryan Chase had been J. R."s friend.

"It pissed me off when I found out they had killed Bryan," he says.

Furthermore, it was clear that the four 9-millimeter bullets that went
into Bryan's body would have been in J. R."s body if he had signed on
for the Lisa shooting.

The next day, Sunday, November 5, acting on the information they had
gotten from J. R Evans and Smith called on Deidre Hunt and Lori
Henderson.

"We went to Hunt's Lenox Avenue apartment," Smith says, "but it was
obvious that they weren't going to say much in front of each other."

At one point, when Deidre was out of the room, Lori turned to the
police and told them she was willing to talk to them alone.  She agreed
to come to the police station the next day.

On Monday when Lori didn't show up, the police went back to Deidre's.

Deidre told them she had taken Lori to a friend's house.

On that same day police who went to the Paspalakis house to continue
the investigation were greeted by Peter Kouracos.  Peter and Kosta,
they learned, had been sleeping in the same bed, a detail that would
inspire some obvious speculation.  Kouracos insisted that nothing
sexual had occurred, that the men were simply napping.

On Tuesday, the 7th, Mike Cox was arrested on an unrelated prostitution
charge.  He told Evans that he had information about the Fotopoulas
shooting, and what he said corroborated J. R."s story.

Later that same day the police caught up with Lori and Deidre at Cheapo
Car Rental on Volusia, where the two young women were returning a
rental.  When the cops asked Lori to come with them, Deidre got
belligerent.

"She pitched a fit," Evans says.  "She did not want us to go alone with
Lori."

Finally, Deidre and Lori both went to the police station and Lori told
the cops everything.  Deidre was arrested.

Lori was arrested two days later.) By the time Lori stopped talking,
the cops had heard ,enough to arrest Kosta.

The Arrest Though Lisa had come to terms with the truth about Kosta on
Saturday night, she would, like her brother, occasionally slip into the
"five percent chance that Kosta didn't do it" mentality.  And like her
brother, she kept what she knew to herself.  The last thing she wanted
was to have Kosta find out that she knew he was a killer.

While the police were busily trying to put the puzzle together and get
enough evidence to arrest Kosta, Lisa and her husband acted out their
roles of deception.  When Kosta came to visit, Lisa recalls now, it was
strange.

"We sat and watched TV mostly.  We didn't talk much about the
shooting.

We talked about family and how business was going at Top Shots.  The
shooting was the one subject we ignored.  It wasn't as if I sat there
thinking all the time about the fact that this man had tried to kill
me.

Usually, I just didn't think about it.  I kept it out of my mind.

I was afraid to think about it.  I still believed in the legal system
and I knew that things would take their course and that he would be
caught.  I guess I still couldn't really deal with the betrayal, the
fact that my husband had tried to kill me."

On his visits, Kosta often fed Lisa.  He held her hand.

He tried to be the perfect husband.  But he said little.

During this period of Lisa's hospitalization Dina visited constantly,
but he and Lisa never acknowledged, in words, what they both knew.

Dina, throughout, was afraid that a discussion of the truth would be
too much for Lisa to handle.  But Lisa knew the truth.  She made that
clear to him on Sunday night, the 5th.

"I told the police about Teja and Lori," Dina said to her that night.

He watched for Lisa's reaction.  She seemed okay.  "I told Kosta he
should go to the police and tell them what he knows about these people,
but I don't think he will."

"What did you tell them?"  Lisa asked.

"I told them that Teja was Lori's boyfriend, and Lori was Deidre's
lover."

"And Deidre was Kosta's lover," Lisa said.  Dina was echoing all the
thoughts she had had.

"Yes."

There was a long moment of silence.  The truth settled in the space
between them.  Then Lisa took her brother's hand.  "Dina," she said,
"one plus one is two."

"Yes," he said, "one plus one is two."

And that was it.  Neither of them was ready to say out loud such a
horrendous thing as, Kosta tried to kill Lisa and murdered an
eighteen-year-old boy.  And at the time, Lisa never imagined that the
truth was far more horrendous.  But in the simplest equation they had
exchanged the information that Kosta was a killer and that they both
knew it.

On Tuesday night, the 7th, Kosta came to visit.  He sat on the edge of
the bed, as usual, awkwardly patted his wife's head, held her hand, and
then fed her.  Kosta talked for a while about Top Shots, about another
business he might open.  But his words were drowned out by the noise of
what went unsaid.  Turning from each other, they watched the TV news.

There were new shootings to be The Arrest reported, other lives being
wrecked.  Lisa, perhaps sensing that this was the last time she would
ever see her husband as a free man, felt the tears come into her
eyes.

She wanted to ask him why.  She wanted to ask him if he had ever loved
her.  But she couldn't.  Though it would be some time before anybody
sat down with Lisa and talked about the meaning of the word sociopath,
she knew already that she had married a hollaw man in whose heart no
love lived.  If he had loved her at all, it was the selfish love of a
child who loves the source of food and presents, not the selfless love
of an adult.  When he was gone, she knew, she would feel the loss not
of the man she had married, but of the one she thought she had married,
a man who had never existed.

Later that same night investigators Wheeler and Palitis came to Lisa's
room and told her and Dina that Kosta was going to be arrested for
murder.  Before they left they moved Lisa into a different room under a
"Jane Doe," so that Kosta could not find her.

Precautions were also taken for Dina.

"You'll spend the night at my place," Wheeler told Dina.

"In the morning you'll be assigned a personal bodyguard."

"A bodyguard?  Why?"

"There might be a contract on you," Wheeler said.

"A contract?  You mean like a hit man?"

"Could be.  Kosta might have hired someone to kill you."

Dina asked if he would need a bulletproof vest.  Wheeler told him no.

"How long will I have a bodyguard?"

"Just until noon," Wheeler said.

"What happens at noon?"

"If we arrest Kosta tonight, then everybody will know it when it hits
the noon news tomorrow.  If there is a contract out on you, the hit man
will know that Kosta is in jail."

"And the hit man will know that he's never going to get paid," Dina
said.

"Right," Wheeler told him.

"Okay," Dina said.  "Let's hope he watches the news."

(Though it has never been proved that a hit man was hired to kill Dina,
Dina's friend Timmy recalls getting strange calls during this time from
someone who was trying to locate Dina but refused to identify himself.)
After the two investigators left, it was as if a weight had been
removed for Lisa and Dina.  Finally, they could talk about it.

Dina told Lisa that some of the boardwalk people had told police that
Kosta bragged about killing Steno.  It was all too much and they talked
about the fact that it would take months for them to sort it all out
and begin to heal.

"Maybe I'll need a shrink," Lisa joked.  She knew she didn't want to go
through life being suspicious of every man she met.  She would do
whatever it would take to put this behind her.

Kosta would be in jail soon and they both felt relieved.

Now they could joke about some of the tense moments of recent days.

Dina had walked across the hospital parking of late one night, when an
air conditioner made a loud boom.  He thought someone was shooting at
him and ran for the door.  "Even at the time," he told Lisa, "I was
thinking, "Gee, if I've got to get shot, at least I'm at a hospital."

There had been another time when Dina had not visited for twelve or
thirteen hours, which seemed like a long time to Lisa.  He came in and
she looked at him oddly and said, "Who are you?"  Dina had been tense
all along that Lisa would suffer some brain damage from the bullet.

Alarmed, He had run to her, almost in tears, "Lisa, Lisa," he'd cried,
"it's me, Dina, don't you know me?"

"Of course I know you," Lisa had said.  "I just mean I haven't seen you
in a while."

They recalled these light moments, knowing that there would be many
difficult moments to come.  Kosta would be tried for murder.

There would be newspaper stories and television shows.  Already the
videotaped murder was becoming a story around the country, picked up by
the wire services and nationally syndicated television shows.

And there would be years of explaining to friends and family exactly
what had happened.

At a little after midnight on Tuesday, officers Bill Batten and Bob
Blackwell, from the street crimes division of the Daytona Beach police
department, drove to the house on North Halifax.  Kosta was not home,
so they parked across the street and waited for him.  When Kosta pulled
in at around one-thirty in the morning of the 8th, the officers drove
over and met him in the driveway.

"You're under arrest," they told him.  "We have to take you to the
police station for questioning."

Though Kosta looked surprised, he made no effort to resist.  Most
likely, he expected to lie and charm his way out of jail within
hours.

Kosta was pleasant and cooperative while the officers handcuffed him
and searched him.  As usual, he was carrying a gun, which the police
confiscated.

On the same Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, while police were
arresting Kosta Fotopoulas, Deidre Hunt was spilling her guts.  She
told the police about her affair with Kosta, his CIA connections, his
terrorist exploits, his days of hiding underground like Rambo ("that's
the kind of training that man went through," she said) the armed
robberies he had planned to pull off with Kevin and other kids, the
counterfeit bills he passed, the array of weapons he owned.  She
squealed about her attempt to recruit killers, the foiled plans to
knock off Lisa, the Teja holdup, and the murder of Kevin Ramsey.

It was in this statement that Deidre began what would become her public
relations strategy for months to come.

She portrayed Kosta as a sadist and a Svengali who had a powerful hold
over her; she painted herself as a victim of intimidation and torture
who was forced to kill Kevin Ramsey or be killed herself.  But her tone
in that confession, which is punctuated by fits of crying, is one of
admiration of the successful student for her sage teacher.

"I know how to rob a bank," she said, "because he told me.  You go in
with three people, and you have one driving.  You go in with three
people wearing ski masks, you have automatic weapons and you tell
people to freeze.  You out, you get in the car, and you have thirty
seconds to get away.  You have two snipers in the building.  When the
police arrive they snipe at the police cars."

At another point she told police, "Kosta was receiving ten thousand
dollars a week in real money from people he had laundering it."

"I think," she said, "that even if you catch him he's going to end up
killing himself, he'll be able to do it."

At two-thirty on Wednesday morning Deidre Hunt agreed to show the
police where she and Kosta had killed Kevin Ramsey.

"We drove out on Clyde Morris to Williamson, near the "trickland
range," Officer Larry Lewis says.  "When we got to Williamson she said,
"Now you have to go to the other side."  This was a mile away from
where we had looked orlier [without Deidre].  We drove toward 1-95
about half mile and she said, "Okay, stop here."  She was sitting in
the backseat.

I said, "Is this the spot' and she said, "Yes."  I got out of the car
and could smell the foul odor in the air.

We got out.  I gave her a flashlight and said, "You show me where it
is."  She walked in the woods about thirty-five feet or so and she
said, "It's just over this little hill."  As we walked over she said,
"There should be a tree that is kind horizontal, broken off at ground
level,' and she flashed the light toward the east.  As she brought the
light around he said, "There it is, right there."  I took her back to
the r, then went back to the woods to make sure it was a human body
because I couldn't tell for sure.  When I got lose I could tell.  The
skull was missing.  The spinal cord was poking up.  He had a black
shirt with some gold wrist on it and dark pants.  His legs were under
him kind of in a sitting position."

One note of interest: When Deidre Hunt was first questioned at her
apartment, Detective Allison Ebel was present.  Ebel noticed that there
was a single book on Deidre's coffee table.  It was a novel published
in 1988 called Frenzy, written by Rex Miller.  She turned the cover to
the front sales page and the first words she read were, "Juan
LaBellamonde came to with his hands wired behind him, bound to a
tree.

Frank Spain reached down on the grass for his bloody implement and held
it in front of the screaming man."

Certainly the fact that Deidre was reading a book in which a man is
bound to a tree and murdered could be a coincidence.  But it does
nurture some suspicions.  For one thing, Kosta Fotopoulos was not a
reader of novels, so if the idea of tying Kevin to the tree did come
from the book, then it would probably have come from Deidre to Kosta,
not the other way around.  (On the other hand, Kosta did a lot of
shooting in those woods, and if you are going to kill somebody in the
woods, tying him to a tree is a fairly obvious thing to do.) However,
this oddity, in combination with the fact that Deidre's ex-boyfriend in
New Hampshire was allegedly hired to murder someone's wife, and then
watched the murder, makes one wonder in whose nest the plot to murder
Lisa was hatched.

David Damore says, "Where did the idea to kill Lisa come in?  Was it
that one night they were lying in bed and Kosta was thinking about how
much money he would have with his wife dead, and did he say, I want to
kill my wife?

Or was it Deidre saying, "Look, you love me and you want to be with
me.

Well, you need to kill your wife'?  We'll never know for sure."

Once Deidre, Kosta, Lori, Teja, Mike Cox, and J. R. were locked up, the
focus of the police investigation shifted to the search for physical
evidence.  Kosta was of no help.  He proclaimed his innocence and
refused to take a lie detector test.  Specifically the police searched
for the weapons that Kosta had used in the Ramsey murder, and the
videotape, which Deidre claimed he had made of that murder.

Police searched Kosta's car.  There they found ten thousand dollars in
cash and several nude photos of Deidre.

They searched Joyland.  They found a small quantity of triacidtone
triphosphate, an explosive.  In a secret drawer they also found several
copies of Playboy and Penthouse.

At Joyland they also looked into Kosta's private safe.

"Kosta liked his privacy," Dina says.  "So we had given him an old safe
that was in Joyland under the stairs.  He had changed the
combination.

After he was arrested I hired a locksmith to meet me at Joyland with
people from the state attorney's office.  When the door to the safe was
ready to be opened, they tied a rope to it and extended it all the way
out of the building and told everybody to get out, because the safe
could be booby trapped.  I'm thinking, Oh, great, my sister's been
shot, my father might have been murdered, my brother-in-law is a
psycho, and now I'm going to have my business blown up."

The safe, as it turned out, contained nothing explosive, either
literally or figuratively.

Both Peter Kouoracos and Vinnie Speziale cooperated with the police
investigators.  Each described going with Kosta while he buried
something in the woods.  Speziale remembered that Kosta's marker was a
telephone pole with notch carved in it.  Using this information police
were eventually able to dig up a cannister containing weapons, in
ammunition box, a .38 revolver, 169 counterfeit onehundred-dollar
bills, and two hand grenades.  They also :ound evidence of fresh
digging nearby, suggesting that some of Kosta's cohorts might have come
along and dug up either weapons or money.

The police searched the house.  They impounded Kosta's comic books and
Soldier of Fortune magazines, thinking they might contain clues to his
behavior.  They took his guns, his ammunition, and his tools for making
silencers and bullets.

One day while police and investigators from the state attorney's office
were at the house, Kosta called Dina collect.

"I picked up the phone and put on the speakerphone so everybody could
hear," Dina says.  "Kosta kept saying, "Dina, I'm innocent.

Dina, I didn't do any of those things they say.  The whole thing is a
frame.  I didn't kill Dad."  "Well, why didn't you take a lie detector
test?"  I said.  "Oh, you know, those things aren't admissable in
court,' he said.

I said to him, "Kosta, there is a little part of me that might have
believed you right up until today."  Then there was a pause and Kosta
got all nervous.  He says, "Why, did they find something today?"

And you could tell from his voice that there was something he was
afraid that they would find.  After I hung up the phone I said to the
police, "That tape is in this house, I'm sure of it."  The search for
the videotape and the weapons continued.

It was late November when the police finally got a break.

"When I was in the hospital the police asked me if I knew any of the
places where Kosta buried things," Lisa says.  "I didn't know where he
buried stuff, just that it was in the woods somewhere.  Then one day
after I got home from the hospital I was looking out at the river and I
thought, "Oh, my God."  It all flashed back to me, the night he was
burying something out by the barbecue.  I called the cops and told them
I had seen Kosta burying something there."

On Wednesday, November 22, the police came to look for the weapons.  As
it turned out, they got a lot more than they had hoped for.  David
Damore recalls: "I went to the Paspalakis house at nine in the
morning.

I was there to have a carpenter cut out a piece of the bedroom floor
containing the bullet that Kosta had put through Bryan Chase's head.

When I pulled into the driveway Dina came up to me and he had this big
smile on his face.

"Dave,' he said, "we found the guns."  As I looked up I saw that Bob
Wheeler and Joe Gallagher were there and they both had Cheshire cat
grins on their faces, so I thought, Okay, it's a joke.  They sent Dina
over to yank my chain, because they knew how desperate I was to find
some physical evidence.  We do this sort of thing.  You need to have a
little humor when you're dealing with such heavy stuff.

"We were in a race against time and our main concern was that some of
the people we did not have in custody might dig up some of the evidence
and get rid of it.  So I was the doubting Thomas and I said, "Yeah,
yeah, yeah, sure you've found the guns."  These two guys were like a
couple of kids, practically dancing, but I wasn't even going to talk to
them because I knew they were joking.  So they tugged at me and
literally towed me around the house to the barbecue area and there were
the cops inventorying the weapons they had found.  They had the .22

Ruger with the silencer that Deidre had used to kill Kevin Ramsey, and
they had the AK47 that Kosta had used for that final shot.

It was unbelievable and I was very excited.

"After we dug out the piece of floor that we needed for evidence, I
went down to the garage with Detective Bill Adamy.  I wanted to show
him a few things that I thought were evidence of the fact that Kosta
was making silencers.

And since we had missed the weapons on previous searches of the house I
wanted to come back and look more thoroughly for the videotape.

I was saying to Bill that we need to redraft the search warrant and
come back and look into every box in the house, just turn the place
upside down.  While we were talking we were just kind of staring at the
wall of the garage, and on one of the shelves against the wall there
was a bag.  I said to Bill, "You know, I feel like there's evidence
here and it's right in front of us and we just can't see it."

"So we started to walk out of the garage and suddenly Bill spun around
and pointed directly up at that bag on the shelf and he said, "Dave,
that bag stinks."  I said, "What do you mean?"  He said, "I'm telling
you, that bag stinks."  I looked at him and I said, "Bill, you're
having delusions.

Look,' I said, "we had a good day, we found the murder weapons, let's
go, and we'll come back another day and really search this place."  He
says, "David, I'm telling you, there's something about that bag."  So I
said, "Okay, if you feel that strongly about it, let's take a look."

By this time I'm thinking, Okay, now they really are pulling my leg.

"So Bill gets on a ladder and he climbs up and looks in the bag without
touching it.  Then he looks down and smiles and he's grinning ear to
ear.  "Dave,' he says, "there's a videotape in this bag."  I was sure
he was yanking my chain, so I called him a name, which has to do with a
person's backside.  But he brought the bag down and sure enough the
videotape was in it.  Incredible.  I'll never forget the way his hand
just went up suddenly and he said, "That bag stinks."" Later that night
Damore and several other officers and investigators viewed the
videotape of Kevin Ramsey being murdered.

"Afterward," he says, "there was just silence."

Though there would be a trial and reams of publicity ahead, the
discovery of the videotape was a kind of closure for Lisa and Dina.

All along they had worried, justifiably, that if the videotape was not
found, Kosta would not be convicted.  Without that tape David Damore
would have gone into court against a well-liked, well-dressed
businessman with only a gang of lawlires for witnesses, all of them
admitted felons and accomplished liars.  But now, with the irrefutable
videotaped evidence in the hands of the police, Lisa and Dina could
breathe easier.  It was over.  Kosta would never walk the streets
again.

When the house was quiet again, after Damore and the others left with
the videotape, Lisa and Dina stood in the living room talking about all
that had happened.

"Now, it's really over," she said to Dina.  Until this moment she
hadn't realized how scared she was that Kosta would be set free, that
he would come into her life again.

"Yes, it's over," Dina said.

She stared at her brother for a long moment.  They had always been
close, but this crisis had brought them even closer.  She thought she
would just hug him and leave it at that.  Instead, she said the words
that had been on her mind all along, words that had been haunting her
since her first night in the hospital.

"I should have known," she said.

"Huh?"

"I should have known.  I should have known he was.

nuts."

"How could you know?"  Dina said.  "I didn't know.

Mom didn't know.  Nobody knew.  Kosta fooled everybody."

"Well, the guns," Lisa said.  "All the crazy schemes."

"A lot of people collect guns," Dina told her.  "A lot of people have
dreams.  God, Lisa, I'm the one who should have known.  I should have
known he would try something that night.  You could have been killed.

I was right there, two doors away when they were shooting you, and I
wasn't there to protect you."

"Dina, you're being ridiculous," Lisa said.  "There's no way you could
have known what would happen.  I don't want you ever to even think such
a thing."

"You don't?  What are you, my sister or something?"

Lisa smiled.

"Look," Dina said, "we can go on forever about who should have seen
what.  But it's crazy.  Every day you read in the papers about somebody
who was nuts and nobody in the world suspected it until he went out and
slaughtered half a dozen people at a mall.  We're intelligent people,
all our friends are intelligent, all the businesspeople on the
boardwalk are intelligent, and not one of them ever came to us and
said, "Hey guys, Kosta is a psychopath."" "And your point?"  Lisa
said.

"My point is that if we didn't see it, then it wasn't there to be seen,
so there's no sense beating ourselves up forget about it."

"Okay," Lisa said, "I won't if you won't," though she knew it was not
that simple, and it would be months before she forgave herself for
bringing this man into her family.

"It's a deal," Dina said.  They shook hands.

"I thought he was such a perfect husband," Lisa said as her brother put
his arms around her.  "Do you think he ever loved me, Dina?

I mean did he really love me at first, or did he plan this all
along?"

Dina's answer was to say nothing, just hold her, and gently stroke her
forehead.  It was enough to make her cry.

She felt comforted in her brother's arms.  Soon she could feel that
Dina was crying, too.  Those Greek men, she thought, they know how to
cry.  They can show their feelings.  He'll make a good husband some
day, she thought.

He'll make some girl very happy.

 EPILOGUE.

In April 1990, Kosta Fotopoulas was tried in federal court in Orlando,
Florida, on counterfeiting charges.  He pleaded guilty to six charges
and was sentenced to thirty-three months in prison.

On May 30 Kosta was placed in solitary confinement at the Valusia
County Branch Jail in Daytona when jail officials suspected that he
planned to escape.  A floor plan for the jail had been found on Kosta
along with several mysterious messages.  County Corrections Director
Terry Moore told the Daytona News Journal, "There have been notes in
the past, notes that have been coded that we could not decipher."

(Though it did not come out in the press, the search of Kosta also
turned up a revealing letter.  It was an unmailed letter to his
illegitimate son, who had been born to Kosta's old girlfriend, Donna,
the year Kosta married Lisa.  The letter was an attempt to tell the boy
about his heritage.

Considering the circumstances, it was a cold and emotionless letter,
little more than a catalog of which uncle came from which city and who
was married to whom.  The letter ,nded, however, poignantly, with Kosta
writing to his boy, read: "I'm sorry, this is my fault."  It was an
ending that might have been used against Kosta in trial, but David
Damore, concluding that the letter was too personal and would bring
unwanted attention to the boy and his mother, chose not to use it.) On
September 6, a sentencing hearing was begun for Deidre Hunt, who had
pleaded guilty months earlier to the murder and attempted murder
charges.  For the first time the videotape of Kevin Ramsey's murder was
shown publicly.

On September 14, Deidre Hunt was given two death sentences and six life
sentences for the murders of Bryan Chase and Kevin Ramsey, and six life
sentences for the various attempts on the life of Lisa Fotopoulas,
conspiracy, and burglary.  Deidre had portrayed herself as the helpless
victim of a madman who would have killed her if she did not do what he
said.  The judge, apparently, did not believe her.  At twenty-one, she
became the youngest woman in the United States on death row.

In October 1990 Kosta was tried for the murders and attempted
murders.

Deidre Hunt, after changing her mind several times, had decided to
testify against him.  The trial was moved to Palatka, forty miles west
of Daytona, because of publicity.

One bizarre revelation from the trial was the fact that State Attorney
John Tanner, Damore's boss, and the man who was responsible for
prosecuting Fotopoulas, along with Damore, had for ten months packed
the very pistol that Kosta used to kill Bryan Chase.

Peter Kouracos had worked as John Tanner's campaign manager in the 1988
election.  In January 1989 Tanner received death threats after trying
to delay the execution of Ted Bundy, so Kouracos lent Tanner the
9-milimeter semiautomatic, which he had borrowed from Kosta.  In
October 1989, Kouracos says, he got the gun back from Tanner and
returned it to Kosta, and passed along to Tanner a Walther PPK, a gift
from Kosta.

Tanner, who has built a reputation as a smut fighter for his war on
porno videos, figured in another strange story about the trial.

During the jury selection phase Tanner told the court he was dismissing
potential juror Elizabeth Roberts because she was so pretty that she
might distract the lawyers from their tasks.  The heat on Tanner for
this blunder had hardly cooled when the incident took another twist.

Miss Roberts received a letter from Kosta Fotopoulos, apologizing to
her for her loss of two days' work and saying he was sorry she had not
been selected.

"I felt because of your age and the special circumstances surrounding
you that you could relate to the situation, and really understand how
things were," Kosta wrote.  At the end of his letter he added a P.S.:
"Love your black outfit."

On October 23, Kosta took the stand in his own trial.  He had an
explanation for everything.  He said he buried guns in cannisters in
the woods because the guns were illegal and they were dangerous.  That,
he explained, is the same reason he buried guns in the backyard near
the barbecue pit.  "I did not want them in the house.  You never know
what happens."

Kosta admitted to having an affair with Deidre Hunt and laid the guilt
for everything at her feet.  He said she was trying to frame him for
the murder of Kevin Ramsey and that it was she who was trying to kill
Lisa.  The way Kosta explained it, Deidre did all this without his
knowledge.  She had borrowed his videotape camera and promised to make
him a film.  Knowing that she was a bisexual, Kosta said he thought she
would make him a sex film of her in bed with another woman.  "I thought
it would be interesting," he explained.  Before he had time to look at
the film his wife was shot.  "The last thing on my mind was looking at
naked women."  This explained why his fingerprints were on the
videotape of Kevin Ramsey being murdered.  As for the fact that his
voice was also on the tape, Kosta denied that it was his voice, even
though an expert, as well as Dina and Lisa, had testified that it was
Kosta's voice on the tape.

"I might like weapons," Kosta told the courtroom, "but I'm not mentally
disturbed."

He said that he was livid that Deidre had hurt his wife and his
marriage.  He said he wished he'd never gotten involved with Deidre.

"I hit myself on the head now," he said.  Kosta also told the courtroom
that he still loved his wife.  He said that he could understand her
wanting a divorce, because of the publicity about his affair with
Deidre.

On October 25, Kosta Fotopoulas was found guilty of the murders of
Kevin Ramsey and Bryan Chase, as well as six attempts on the life of
his wife, Lisa.  Later that night, in his cell, Kosta somehow managed
to cut his ankles and his left wrist.  Thirty stitches were required
and, according to jail officials, no sharp instruments were found in
his cell.

Jail and courthouse officials concluded that Kosta was not attempting
suicide but was trying to injure himself so that he would not be
shackled and handcuffed when he went before the jury for the sentencing
phase of the trial.

Another possibility: he wanted to be transferred to a prison hospital
so that he could try to escape.

On October 29 the jury, by an eight-to-four vote, recommended the death
sentence for Kosta Fotopoulos.

On November 1, three days less than a year after the shooting, Judge
James Foxman gave Kosta two death sentences and six life sentences for
the murders and attempted murders.  Kosta's mother, who was at the
trial, ran from the courtroom, shouting, "My son is innocent."

On November 14, 1990, Lori Henderson and Teja James, both of whom had
testified for the state at Kosta's trial, were each sentenced to four
years in prison for conspiring to commit first-degree murder and
attempted first-degree murder.

Newman Taylor, J. R testified at the Fotopoulos trial.

He later was released from jail, violated probation, was put in jail
again, and released again.

Mike Cox was released and became a Christian.  He later returned to his
grandparents' home in Kentucky.

Of Peter Kouracos, David Damore says, "It is not unreasonable to say
that eyebrows are certainly raised concerning Kouracos.  He seems to be
everywhere when events are about to happen.  There are a lot of
questions concerning his relationship with Kosta.  Certainly the most
vociferous defenders of Kosta Fotopoulas at his trial were Peter
Kouracos and his mother, Lydia."

No charges relating to the murders or attempted murders have been filed
against Peter Kouracos.

Vinnie Speziale works at an auto dealership in Daytona Beach.

Lisa Fotopoulas is fully recovered from her wound and suffers no ill
effects from the bullet, which remains in her brain.  She is well and
happy and is today operating Joyland with her brother, Dina.

In January 1991 the body of Steno Paspalakis was exhumed at the request
of the family.  A medical examination of the body revealed no toxin,
and no reason to believe that Mr. Paspalakis died from anything other
than an aneurysm.

Examiners did note that, since it had been three years since Steno's
death, no conclusion could be reached with certainty.

the end