“Do you know if John’s involved in anything illegal?”

  “No.”

  It was a lie in some respects; his entire life could be classified as illegal.

  “We think John might have been involved in a homicide.”

  Christine reacted “shocked and alarmed,” Felber wrote in his report of the conversation. “Oh, my goodness,” she said.

  “Has John ever talked about anything like that?”

  “No.”

  Good investigators are patient. They know how to plant a seed, walk away and allow that information to germinate in the mind of a potential source. In a way, a source, like Christine Todaro, was a veiled adversary, only to be trusted to a point until she proved herself. Keeping her walking on eggshells, wondering, waiting, was going to be an asset to the investigation. It was clear she knew more, but they didn’t want to push her right now.

  Felber took out his card and handed it to Christine. “If you think of anything else, can you call me?”

  “Sure.”

  When they left, Christine sat down at the table and wondered why she hadn’t just come out with it. By contrast, she was scared to death of John Zaffino. If he found out she was talking to the police, without even thinking twice about it, he would “stomp the s - - -” out of her, or, worse, she believed, “put a bullet in my head. He had already killed one person,” Christine said later. “I know he wouldn’t have thought twice about killing me to cover up the entire thing.”

  With the CAPU gone, Christine, now filled with emotion and fear, decided the best thing to do was to call her ex-husband. Contact John and see what he knows. Christine knew the guy, his moods, how he thought. If he knew the CAPU had been to her house, she’d be able to hear it in his voice.

  She dialed his number, thinking, What if he drove by my house while they were here?

  Christine was now very much concerned about her role in helping Zaffino throughout the past year. Had she committed a crime herself? Zaffino was acting as if he had something over her. She had always questioned whether he had committed the murder—he had never come out and told her, yes, it was me—but she knew in her heart, not to mention several comments he had made, that he could have done it.

  Zaffino had recently given his telephone number to Christine’s father, telling him to let her know to call him. Now was as good a time as any.

  “John,” she said after he answered, “the cops were just here.” Playing dumb, she asked, “What is going on?” Then, “I’m not going to jail for anybody…if it comes down to me or you, it’s going to be you.” Christine said later that she had used that line on her ex-husband just about every time they spoke, repeatedly reminding him, regardless of the consequences, that she wasn’t “going down” on his behalf.

  “F- - - those cops. Don’t tell them anything,” he said.

  “They were here, John. In my house.” She felt like he didn’t believe her, which offered a bit of comfort. At least she now knew he hadn’t driven by or heard it from someone it on the street.

  “F- - - them.” He was chuckling a bit. “Tell them to f- - - off. Don’t answer any of their questions.”

  “I have their business cards.”

  “I want them.”

  “The cards?”

  “Yes…I’m on my way over.”

  56

  Christine Todaro was fully aware of the consequences she faced once John Zaffino found out she was talking to the CAPU. She needed protection as much as she needed to finally tell police all she knew about the murder of Jeff Zack, which was a lot more than anyone thought. Felber and King showing up at her apartment to talk to her was one thing—but the FBI’s presence terrified Christine. Things had turned serious—and she knew it. She handed off the business cards to Zaffino and managed to find sleep after he said a few nasty words about the cops and took off. But this was it. She couldn’t hide what she knew any longer.

  First thing the next morning, June 13, Christine decided to drive to the APD and explain everything. “I realized,” Christine recalled, “I just couldn’t go through my life with all that I knew about this—not to mention John had threatened to kill me on a daily basis. But it wasn’t so much just me. It really bothered me when John started threatening my dad and Tony.”

  Once inside the confines of the CAPU’s sixth-floor office, Christine sat down in the conference room with Detective Vince Felber, Captain Beth Daugherty and FBI special agent Roger Charnesky.

  She talked about how, where and when she met Zaffino. Daugherty did most of the questioning while Charnesky and Felber watched Christine’s body movements and studied how she answered questions. Then Christine gave Daugherty a complete rundown of Zaffino’s family, before Daugherty asked, “Can you tell us about your marriage to John?”

  Christine, of course, sighed, bowed her head and felt a sharp pain in her gut. “Horrible,” she said. “Absolutely horrible.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was very abusive. Very abusive. You know, he almost strangled me to death once in front of my kids.”

  After a brief description of how violent Zaffino had been throughout their marriage, Christine talked about how she realized her ex-husband was involved in Jeff Zack’s murder. It started when Zaffino told her one night “to watch out for [herself].” What he meant was, there were a few guys after him, he claimed, and they would be after her as well. All because, Christine told Daugherty, Zaffino had “beat the shit out of this Jeff Zack guy, but he didn’t use [Zack’s] name.”

  Felber said, “OK?” Implying, How do we know it was Jeff Zack he was talking about?

  “I knew who he meant.”

  “How did you know?” Daugherty wondered.

  “Because he talked about this white-haired…guy—that’s what he called him.”

  “Oh?”

  “OK, and he said it’s ‘Zack Something,’ OK?” Christine said.

  “OK.”

  The murder—and Zaffino’s involvement—all started to make sense to Christine, she recalled, when the Akron Beacon Journal ran its first story about the Zack murder during the early morning hours of June 17, 2001. Before she saw the article, she was quick to say, she believed Zaffino’s role in Zack’s murder to be another tall tale he was telling, trying to act like the tough guy he had always wanted to be. She had gone out with friends that night and picked up an early edition of the newspaper on her way home. As soon as she looked at the headline, the thought hit her: He did it. John did it. Son of a gun. He really killed that guy.

  What had given Christine cause for alarm? The events that led up to that day, she said. Zaffino showed up at her house, before the murder, asking if he could “talk.” He sat down. “I want to tell you that someone is looking for me,” he said with a serious effect. Christine wondered who. Why? What was going on? It was around the first of the year, 2001. “I was a bit pissed off,” she recalled later, that he was in her apartment to begin with. Their marriage was over. According to her version, Zaffino was a wife beater. She wanted nothing to do with him. But he wasn’t the type of guy she could just brush off. Ever since the split, she had moved from town to town trying to avoid him. But he always tracked her down. She knew he had met someone else, which was good. “A blonde,” he described the woman to Christine, “with money. Her name is Cindy.” But that was it. He went no further.

  Zaffino continued talking. “The guy [that’s after me] is a white-haired Israeli. He’s looking for me because I beat the shit out of him in front of his posse. He knows who you are, too.” Then he said that “Ed George has something to do with this, so I want you to stay out of the Tangier.”

  Christine figured out rather quickly that the woman her ex-husband was talking about had to be Cynthia George. But at that time, Christine believed Cynthia was Ed’s daughter—and thought for sure that the “white-haired” guy was also dating “Cindy.”

  To Christine, Zaffino had always been a braggart; he liked to tell “stories” about himself. She never knew what to believe. But if the Israeli, as Zaffino put it, was out and about looking for him and also knew where she lived…“What the hell are you doing here?” Christine asked Zaffino in a panic. She didn’t want the guy after her, too.

  “Get out of here,” Christine finally said as Zaffino carried on about the guy and how he had been going back and forth with him.

  Zaffino ultimately left. Christine was glad to see him go. It was the first time she had heard about a white-haired Israeli who Zaffino claimed was causing problems for him.

  Sometime later, she explained to Felber, Daugherty and the FBI, Zaffino showed up again. “Anyone looking for me?” he asked. “Anybody been around?” They were standing outside her apartment by Zaffino’s car.

  “John, I’m through with this shit. Get out of here.” As she spoke, Christine noticed there was a gun holster on the seat of his car. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to it. “Is that for me?” she wondered out loud. More intimidation. Scare tactics. She thought Zaffino had brought the gun along to frighten her, same as he had in the past.

  “No, no, no. That’s not for you,” Zaffino said, kind of laughing at the suggestion. Then he opened the car door, grabbed the gun and began waving it in front of her face. It was a handgun. A .38 caliber. Christine knew guns. She had grown up around them. Her father was an avid collector. She had target shot her entire life. She wasn’t some naïve female who had never seen or handled a handgun before and jumped back like a mouse was in the room at the sight of one. “I’ve been raised around guns,” she added.

  After showing off his gun, Zaffino left.

  Then the telephone calls started.

  Reassessing the balance of power, Christine decided that she needed to move again. Zaffino had a handgun. He was a hot button and could snap, she believed, at any moment. She had to get away from him.

  Not long after she moved, Zaffino found her. But not only did she believe Zaffino was “following her,” but it seemed everywhere she went—to clubs, bars—with her girlfriends, “the same two guys would appear.” One time, she confronted one of the guys inside a bar. “Don’t you think it’s strange that wherever I go,” she said in jest, “you guys are always in the same place?”

  The guy shrugged.

  “Aren’t you friends with Ed George?” Christine asked.

  “I can’t stand Ed George,” the guy said.

  Christine had put the Ed and Cynthia George connection together after being at Zaffino’s apartment one day picking up some of her belongings. The telephone rang while she was there. She glanced over at the caller ID while Zaffino was out of the room, and noticed the name “Cynthia George” on the little screen. By then, she had figured out that Cynthia was Ed’s wife. She had even written down Cynthia’s cell phone number (and later handed it to the CAPU).

  As they sat and listened to Christine tell her story, Felber and Daugherty were interested. But part of Christine’s story seemed too perfect. Captain Daugherty was pessimistic. She had been a cop for twenty years. She had made captain in 2000, had been a lieutenant for five years prior to that, a sergeant for three years leading up to making lieutenant. She was skeptical about Christine Todaro. Maybe she was involved in the entire plot, Daugherty wondered. Perhaps she had come in to score the best deal because the heat had been turned up. “But,” Daugherty told me later, “we had Christine tell her story from beginning to end. Then we asked her to tell it backward. Then from the middle. And every time she told her story, it never wavered. It stayed the same, every detail. We knew then that she was telling the truth.”

  Christine said later, “At first, I thought that maybe Ed George had chosen John and brought Cindy in and it was his plan to have John be the fall guy. But as I got to know the story better, I realized that it didn’t appear that Ed [George] knew John at all.”

  57

  As Christine Todaro told her story to the CAPU, it was clear that, over the course of the past year, John Zaffino had waged a careful campaign to get her involved in the murder of Jeff Zack. Some sort of “If I go down, so do you” scenario. Zaffino, she said, had taken all of his guns and ammunition and given them to her, asking her to hold on to them. What was she supposed to do? The guns were in her name. Of course she had to take them. As time went on after the murder, Christine became bolder and carried on like a detective, trying to figure out how and why Zaffino had murdered Zack. But not so she could run to the police—more so she could protect her own interests. “I was not going to go to jail for that guy.”

  So when Christine saw the newspaper on the night of Zack’s murder and stared at a photograph of Jeff Zack accompanying the article, everything Zaffino had said began to make sense. “I didn’t even have to read the article,” she recalled. “I went through it all in my mind. I knew that John had told me that [someone] had bought him a motorcycle. I recalled the ‘white-haired Israeli’ comment John had made to me…the fact that this guy was bothering John and John said he had beaten the shit out of him ‘in front of his posse.’ I had seen John with that handgun. I knew what the guy looked like.”

  It all added up to murder. She felt Zaffino wasn’t bragging this time; he had actually killed someone.

  On top of it all, there was another comment Zaffino had made to Christine later on that further confirmed her theory. While talking to Zaffino one night on the telephone, asking him about the guy who was supposedly bothering him, Zaffino, in his condescending, coldhearted voice, told her not to worry about it anymore. There was no need to be on edge about the guy.

  “Why not?” Christine asked.

  “He is going to have a hard time parting his hair from now on,” Zaffino said coldly.

  When she heard those words come out of Zaffino’s mouth, Christine took it as a yes, she told Beth Daugherty and Vince Felber. “To me, that was a yes.”

  Detectives from the CAPU wondered what had stopped Christine from coming forward sooner? When they looked at it on paper, it seemed convenient that in walked the answers to a murder case that had baffled the CAPU for a year. It was hard for some members of the unit to get around why Christine had waited so long. “Fear,” she said. “[John] has been threatening me the whole entire time.”

  “Have you ever [seen] John on a motorcycle?”

  “I never saw the motorcycle or him on it,” she said later. “Like I had said, he used the motorcycle as a weapon.” In other words, he was a soon-to-be ex-husband. “He was bragging [to me] about all the things that his ‘new girlfriend’ was doing for him.” Then another key statement: “New clothes, money, motorcycle, cell phones, new residence.” According to Christine, which she later testified to in court, John Zaffino’s girlfriend, Cynthia George, had bought him a motorcycle and he bragged to her about it.

  The CAPU had its most interesting—if not compelling—witness thus far. It had taken upward of a year, but it seemed the case had just taken a major turn.

  “Are you willing to work with us?” Dave Whiddon asked Christine at some point. “Maybe wear a wire and record conversations with John Zaffino?”

  Christine thought about it. What else could she do? She was in up to her neck at this point. “Yes,” she said, “I think I can do that.”

  58

  The CAPU had some serious work ahead of them. Before dragging John Zaffino in, detectives needed to learn as much as they could about him. Christine Todaro was going to help. But setting her up with a wire and recording device for her telephone was going to take time. It had to be done in the normal course of Christine’s relationship with Zaffino. She couldn’t go running to him now asking questions about the white-haired Israeli if she and Zaffino hadn’t talked about it in some time. It would seem too suspicious.

  Once the CAPU had some information about Zaffino, be it from Christine or other sources, questioning him would be more productive—maybe they could even gather enough evidence to make an arrest. It wasn’t hard to get a rap sheet on Zaffino. Lieutenant Whiddon and Vince Felber asked Carrie Stoll, the CAPU’s true ambassador of the most tiresome jobs in the office, to come up with a complete printout on Zaffino, while they continued working on setting Christine up with the recording devices she needed, as well as briefing her on what to do.

  Meanwhile, on June 13, 2002, Summit County investigator Dan Kovein, who worked for the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office, called the CAPU and explained to Vince Felber that one of the two addresses Summit County had for John Zaffino must be wrong. Felber had heard that Kovein’s daughter had lived at one of the addresses, so he put in a call to the investigator to ask him about it. Kovein said his daughter had lived there the previous year. But they came to find out, she had lived in apartment number 1603. Zaffino lived next door in 1602. After talking to his daughter, Kovein said she remembered Zaffino fairly well.

  He had a “sporty” motorcycle. “She saw him frequently,” Kovein told Felber, “with a blond—very skinny—girlfriend.”

  The following day, Felber drove out to South Akron, the last known address of John Zaffino. Along the way, Felber couldn’t help but notice Zaffino’s apartment was a straight shot down Route 8 from the Home Avenue BJ’s. On a good day, without any traffic, it was maybe a ten-minute drive. Certainly a lot quicker on a Ninja motorcycle.

  Felber stopped at the manager’s office and found out Zaffino had been living at the address in June 2001 and had signed a rental agreement for the place back in August 2000. He listed one employer—himself—on the agreement. Zaffino had a son, twelve years old then, who had stayed with him on weekends from time to time, the office manager told him.

  “What can you tell us about Mr. Zaffino?” Felber asked, looking down at Zaffino’s application.

  “Aggressive,” she said. “Annoying. Yeah.” She shook her head.

  “You ever see him with anyone, or riding a motorcycle?” Felber asked.

  “No, I don’t recall.”

  What was interesting, Felber noticed, was that on the rental agreement, where it asked a potential renter to supply what person the management office should contact in case of an emergency, Zaffino had written “Cindy Rohr.” He also gave a telephone number where Cynthia could be reached, but failed to put her address or any other personal information.