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Category:
Mystery/Suspense
Publisher: Barricade Books
ISBN-10: 0934878498
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 232
Copyright: April 2015
ISBN-13: 9780934878494
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
In-depth book about the life and death of Susan Berman, daughter of mobster Davey Berman, who was fatally shot in back of her head in her own Beverly Hills home.
Growing up, Susan Berman’s childhood was idyllic. She was Las Vegas Mob royalty, the daughter of a Mob boss who ran the Flamingo and furnished his only child with anything money could buy. But halfway through her childhood, dream exploded. Susan’s father died without warning during a routine surgery. Next, Susie Berman’s mother died by her own hand the next year when she overdosing on drugs. Susie was whisked away from the only home she’d ever known, parentless and living with an uncle and his family and sent away to boarding school. Fast forward to college where Susan met her soul mate, Robert Durst. They became best friends and each other’s confidants. Durst went to work for his wealthy father at the Durst Organization in Manhattan while Susan became a journalist, writing about women’s cultural issues for newspapers and magazines. She followed Durst to New York, where he married the beautiful Kathie McCormack. Then, Kathie disappeared and Susan stood by her best friend Robert, despite suspicions that Durst had caused the demise of his wife. Twenty years later, as police closed in on Durst and reopened the case, seeking to interview his best friends, Susan was murdered. Few clues were found. Who did it and why? Was it the Mob? A trusted friend? Murder in Beverly Hills (an updated, revised edition of Murder of a Mafia Daughter) answers those questions. Exclusive information about the investigation is included in this edition, as well as new interviews of police detectives, Susan’s friends, family and colleagues, and new information about Robert Durst is revealed.
Excerpt
Murder of a Mafia Daughter is a story about a path to murder that begins in old Las Vegas with gangsters and the boys from the Jewish mob. It moves to San Francisco with the movers and shakers, to New York City with its literati, and ends in Beverly Hills with the glitterati.
The slaying of Susan Berman in the winter of 2000 had all the earmarks of a professional hit aimed at a person born into the Mafia. Or was that just what the killer intended everyone to think, to lead investigators to the assumption that it was a Mob hit when it was not? Or was it her best friend Robert Durst who wanted her dead? If it was not a Mafia hit, then who else could have done it? And why? These are the questions I’ve pursued in the many years I’ve covered Susan Berman’s murder, looking for evidence, clues, and the who, what, and whys of the case. The book also looks into who had motive, means, and opportunity. It invariably comes back to one person: Susan’s old friend Robert Durst.
In my research, I got to know Susan, an author and screenwriter. I drove the route from her Las Vegas childhood home to her final house in Benedict Canyon. I visited the restaurants and bistros she frequented in the Beverly Hills town she loved and called home during the final seventeen years of her life. I walked through the Las Vegas house on South Sixth Street where she lived with her parents during her first twelve years. It was a bright, cheerful house. I imagined her as a child, running down the long hallway into the welcoming arms of the father she adored.
I went to the University of California, Berkeley campus where Susan got her master’s degree in journalism and where protests against the war in Vietnam were rampant. Susan made lifelong friends while attending Berkeley—many in the writing world who later tossed work her way.
I went to her home in Benedict Canyon where she was murdered. I stood in front of her house on the same path her killer walked before ending her life.
And, finally, I visited the Home of Peace cemetery in East Los Angeles where Susan’s body is entombed in a marble wall alongside her mother, father, and uncle. A recent visitor had left flowers in budvases, one on either side of Susan’s shiny-brass headstone. It is where family and friends waited patiently for Robert Durst to arrive, but he didn’t show for the funeral of his old friend.
Susan’s murder was one of three Durst was accused of committing since 1982. At the LAPD’s Robbery- Homicide Division, her murder was a cold case. But it was hardly over. Police began closing in on Robert Durst. It came to a head on an early spring evening when a visitor to New Orleans casually enjoyed a meal at Chef Emeril Lagasse’s NOLA restaurant on St. Louis Street.
But this was no ordinary tourist. It was multi-millionaire Robert Durst, heir to a New York City real estate fortune, seemingly on the run in anticipation of being arrested for the murder of his one-time confidant and best friend, Susan Berman. Susan was no ordinary person either. She was a mob princess and the daughter of notorious Jewish mobster Davie Berman, a bootlegger running rackets in the Midwest before he was tapped to run the skim at Las Vegas casinos. When they met in college, Susan and Durst were instant soul mates.
Outside the New Orleans restaurant, throngs of pedestrians celebrated St. Patrick’s Day and St. Joseph’s Day. As Durst left, he was anonymous amidst the crowd and no doubt felt confident that he was just one step away from leaving the country and being out of reach of U.S. authorities.
Thin, gray, and a much older-looking man than the public had previously seen, Durst, wearing a button- down shirt and jacket, entered the lobby at the Canal Street Marriott mumbling to himself, a habit he’d taken up in recent years. To his surprise, there to greet him were two FBI agents with a first-degree murder warrant signed by a Los Angeles County judge for Susan’s death.
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