Veteran turf writer Bill Christine recalls a trip to the fearsome prison in upstate New York to interview former leading trainer, who died in 1989 as he served a life sentence for murder
Around Christmastime 35 years ago, I got a typewritten note from Buddy Jacobson, a resident at the infamous Attica prison in upstate New York. Buddy was doing 25 years to life, having been convicted of killing his former girlfriend’s new boyfriend.
“Drop in anytime,” wrote Buddy, once the leading horse trainer in the US. “I’m always home.” This was uncommon cheek from an inmate dying of cancer of the spine.
I had been talking with Rita Costello, Buddy’s sister, about making a trip to Attica. Rita was trying to get Buddy a new trial and she was looking for a media boost. I told her that I would write the story down the middle, and she and Buddy would have to take their chances, and she was OK with that.
I flew from Los Angeles to Buffalo, rented a car at the airport and drove the 35 miles to Attica, a stone fortress that was just as menacing as it was portrayed in the 1980 TV movie about the bloody riot there several years before.
One of those punishing January snowstorms was already upon Buffalo. I was alone on the shuttle bus from the distant Attica parking lot, but for a woman and her son, who was probably 10 years old. Her husband had killed somebody. She had a bag of the biggest avocados I ever saw. “He loves avocados,” she said.
At the metal detector leading into the lockup, I went through on the first try. But the woman behind me kept setting off the thing. Finally, she took several bobby pins out of her hair. Her new ’do, probably less than a day old, collapsed like a bad souffle. Instead of looking glamorous for her husband, she was going to look like somebody who finished second to a squall.
‘You want to look me in the eye, I guess’
Buddy Jacobson, seated at a wooden table for six in a small meeting room, was waiting. We were alone, but there was a picture window, and a prison guard stood on the other side.
Almost jockey-size, Buddy was 57 and looked pasty. He had 80A3899 stencilled across the chest of his gray prison garb. I sat next to him and put my notebook in front of me (the newspaper had ordered that we use tape recorders; a klutz incarnate since birth, I never trusted myself with one of those gadgets; decades after my crime, you are hearing about this for the first time).
“Sit over there, will ya?” Buddy said, pointing to a chair directly across.
“You want to look me in the eye, I guess?” I said.
“It’s not that,” he said. “My back’s so bad, it’s hard for me to turn my neck.”
Before I left for Buffalo, I had called Pete Axthelm, a friend and a columnist for Newsweek magazine. Pete fancied himself a horseplayer, and had kibbitzed with Jacobson over the years.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I can’t be sure,” Axthelm said, “but my gut says he didn’t do it. It was a sloppy deal. Burning the body, in a wooden crate on a vacant lot, on a Sunday afternoon in the Bronx, in broad daylight? That wouldn’t have been Buddy. He was savvy, street smart. If he really wanted to kill the guy, he would have hired somebody. That would have been Buddy’s way.”
The victim was Jack Tupper, a restaurateur who had been linked to drug deals, which would have supplied motives for others. The girl in the triangle was Melanie Cain, a supermodel before there were supermodels. She was barely out of her teens, and Jacobson, trying to pass for 29, was in his early 40s.
The worst $50,000 never spent
At Attica, Jacobson told me that the worst $50,000 he never spent was the increased fee that his attorney, Jack Evseroff, threw at him only minutes before an 11-week trial began.
“This trial’s going to be longer than I bargained for,” Evseroff reportedly said. “What we first agreed on isn’t going to be enough.”
Jacobson had the 50 grand, and more. He thrived in the horse business, and parlayed the profits into Manhattan real estate. He even owned a modelling agency called My Fair Lady.
“What a dummy I was,” he said about Evseroff’s demand. “I didn’t pay the 50 and he didn’t give me a full day’s work.”
Still, after almost three months in court, the jury was deadlocked. The judge refused to let them go, and three days later they came in with a guilty verdict.
Before Attica, Jacobson, with the help of another model, engineered a fantastic escape from the Brooklyn House of Detention. As Jacobson, wearing a tweed suit that had been smuggled into the prison, raced down the front steps to a waiting getaway car, he collided with a woman carrying two bags of groceries.
‘What the hell am I doing?’
“I bent over and started to pick up boxes of cereal, oranges, everything,” Buddy said. “Then I thought, what the hell am I doing? I left the groceries and got in the car.”
Eventually, Jacobson’s young accomplice went back to her parents, and Buddy became a loner at a motel in Manhattan Beach, California. He carried around a portable typewriter and told everybody that he was a writer.
Bored, he couldn’t resist calling Bobby Frankel, a carryover from their backstretch days at the New York racetracks. Frankel was based at Hollywood Park, in the early days of what would become a Hall of Fame training career. The day after Jacobson’s call, the FBI showed up at Frankel’s barn. He stonewalled them as best he could.
Buddy fell in love again, not with a young model but with the fried zucchini at the Criterion, a restaurant near his motel. He was eating half an order, and drinking a cup of coffee. The Manhattan Beach police station was only half a football field away. He went peaceably.
“The check was a dollar and six cents,” Buddy said. “I didn’t have to pay it.”
After I left Buddy and reached the Attica parking lot, I found my rental car buried in snow. I envisioned spending the night in there. But they had a tow truck that was used to dealing with storms.
A year after my visit, Buddy died at 58 in a hospital near Attica. His cancer was out of control. He died on the day a hearing had been scheduled regarding his possible retrial.
Rita Costello, Jacobson’s sister, and I had lunch in New York, in a Manhattan restaurant. “Our mother never knew,” she said. “She never knew he was in prison, never knew he was dying. We had one of the old eye-witnesses lined up. She was going to change her testimony.”
Several years ago, on a whim I called Jack Evseroff, the Brooklyn lawyer who told Jacobson he was underpaid. Over a long and colorful career, Evseroff represented street criminals, rogue policemen, Mafia dons and Jack Molinas, a collegiate basketball star who conspired with gamblers to fix games in the 1950s.
“Come to New York,” Evseroff said. “I’ll buy you dinner and tell you who really killed Jack Tupper.”
I’m sorry I didn’t go. ‘Jack Evseroff Takes Down His Shingle’ said one headline a few years ago. He was 91 then. By my count, that makes him about 98 now, and I hear that he’s still around. What do I look like, somebody who doesn’t know where his next whim is coming from?
• Bill Christine wrote about horse racing for 25 years at the Los Angeles Times, winning two Eclipse Awards, the Walter Haight Award and sharing in a Pulitzer Prize. Author of Bill Hartack: The Bittersweet Life of a Hall of Fame Jockey, he is working on a novel
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