(All links are set to the appropriate timestamp.)
During his second interview on The Manny Grossman Show, Mr. Roach seems to have forgotten what he said in the first one. I can give you a couple of examples but by far my favorite is when Mr. Roach denies ever mentioning the name Ken in the first place.
From the second interview:
(3:12) “And and I didn't say Ken, he said Ken. He gave me the name Ken, he goes, ‘there was a guy, Ken’…”
Compare this to what he said the first time around at the 10:07 mark:
“…that girl was with this guy - Ken was the name I made up - and he says, ‘oh yeah, there was a Ken there’…”
In the second interview (5:56), after receiving a copy of his Moloch/Gimil-Ishbi sketch, Mr. Roach exclaimed, “how could he [Maury Terry] believe that this was a real person? I mean look at that shit. Someone did did a thing and said it looked like Nosferatu.”
And yet in his very first interview (16:24), Tony observed, "BUT, the funny thing is, he [the deceased “Moloch”] looked exactly like the fucking picture [the Gimil-Ishbi sketch].”
Faulty memory? Maybe not.
This is the same Mr. Roach that Manny Grossman referred to as a “smart guy” and praised him for remembering, “what the wall said [the “Mr. Williams Hole” message in Berkowitz’s apartment]."
Manny continued, "he hadn’t, I hadn't shown him that, he hadn't looked at that beforehand. He remembered what that wall said from like 20 years before, 25 years ago, right.” (30:00)
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Throughout both interviews, Mr. Roach keeps insisting that he and Mr. Terry were “bullshitting” each other. Yet we never find out how Maury was bullshitting Tony.
From our previous post:
"At that point [Moloch’s 1996 wake] I believed Maury, you know? It wasn't until I ran into you [Manny] that, like, hey, you know, something's not right here.”
In the second interview, we also find a Tony Roach who is now very angry at Maury Terry. Again, we are given no reason for this. I’m sure it has something to do with running into Manny.
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Thus far I have tried to leave Mr. Grossman’s audience out of the analysis. I don’t know enough about these people - who they are, where they come from, why they tune in - to really make any honest, accurate, judgement calls.
What I can do is go so far as to say that, in my opinion, Manny treats them like idiots. The following is a fine example. From “Billy The Artist-Manny Grossman Discovers Bombshells in the Comic Book Archive!”, the 25:15 mark:
“If he [Tony] lied to Maury, that means Maury’s most crucial eyewitnesses claims were all untrue and you know what that means for the book. That it's a huge piece of the book taken away.”
Tony/“Billy” makes his first appearance towards the end of The Ultimate Evil in the 1999 third edition. His fraudulent testimony occupies barely two pages (532-3, 1999). All of it can fit on this one .pdf page.
Manny would have people believe the entire book, The Ultimate Evil, rests on Tony Roach.
Unfortunately, it's Manny who is staking his entire reputation on the testimony of "Billy the Artist" (7:52). Not a wise bet.
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I could go on and on. The series is a complete mess from top to bottom. The narrative has more holes than a pegboard. I'm just glad it's over because I can't wait to get into the "famous" Brooklyn Series.
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Indeed, Manny is trying to hang the entire case that Maury Terry made for cult involvement on the Billy/Tony nail--and it doesn't support the weight. A couple of weeks ago he was trolling me on various YouTube comment threads, asking me what I thought of his exclusive interview. The gotcha factor is extremely important to him (no matter how flaccid his "gotchas" have proven to be, time and time again), and in emphasizing the scoop he insists that he's gotten, he leaves himself open to the most obvious criticisms. For starters, Suzette Rodriguez's link to the case long predates any knowledge that Maury had of Tony Roach. Her name appears in the original hardcover edition of "The Ultimate Evil," and was relevant because it appears that police initially were investigating her murder as cult-related. Simple newspaper research confirms this, which is why Team Manny hates newspaper research. (In December 2022 they were making flatly idiotic claims on Twitter about the yellow VW in the Moskowitz attack, and with just a few keystrokes I was able to demonstrate--via a 1977 Daily News headline--that they were lying.) In their eagerness to dismiss an allegedly peripheral figure like Suzette, they ignore basic information which is accessible to anyone, and which contradicts their narrative.
ReplyDeleteI say "Team Manny" because there obviously *is* a team who script the talking points that he recites in his videos. I worked with him in 2021, and take my word for it: he doesn't do any research of his own. He couldn't even be bothered to write down names and phone numbers. Once again, I would question whether or not he's ever read "The Ultimate Evil" in its entirety. He quotes specific passages that he wants to refute, of course, but makes an unaccountable number of basic errors...and seems to be entirely unaware of other facts pertaining to the case. Those are precisely the foibles of the person I worked with three years ago.
(I rarely get an opportunity to bring my formal art education to bear on the SoS investigation, but I would point out that Tony made adjustments to the sketches that allegedly depicted Suzette Rodriguez and Moloch/Mr. Real Estate. They're not exact copies of the John Buscema "Conan" panels. I've noted elsewhere that he gave the face in the Suzette sketch a nose that lacked harshly defined lines, and that this was, in fact, an accurate real-life detail. Look at the original drawing from the comic book and then compare it to Tony's sketch: he actually went to the trouble of shortening the nose. Likewise, in his copy of the Gimil-Ishbi character that was supposed to represent Moloch, Tony made the face longer and thinner, which comports with an eyewitness description of James Donovan. It does nothing for Tony's credibility that, rather than executing original drawings, he chose to represent these individuals with sketches he copied from a comic book...but he managed to endow them with accurate physical details. [He also produced an eerily accurate likeness of Frank Signorelli. That sketch appears to have been executed in Tony's natural style.] The fact that the two sketches in question were done in blatantly '70s Marvel Comics style indicates that they actually *were* drawn in the '70s and not decades after the fact. I said that two years ago, back when Manny was insisting that the sketches were later fabrications and Billy the Artist had never existed.)
Good job on pointing out the holes in the opposing team's narrative. Keep it up.
-- Jonathan Mitchell
Mr. Mitchell, what a pleasure to see you here! I believe you occupy a place on Manny's enemies list right below Maury Terry and maybe tied or a step above Ms. Dana. Watching him work himself into a lather every time he mentions you is very amusing.
DeleteYou bring up many, many interesting points and I thank you for the kind words and your insights.
Manny claims to be obsessed with the case but I don't think that's the whole story. He is, without a doubt, obsessed with making fools out of Maury Terry and the so-called "Terry Heads" and I'm at a total loss as to why.
He keeps accusing Maury of being a liar but I have yet to see it stick.
Btw, it's quite fortuitous for you to write in at this time because I have a question that you are well qualified to answer. If you don't mind?
How many eye witness reports from the Moskowitz case did Maury have in his possession? I have a very good reason for asking this as it is related directly to my next post.
By my count, Maury had eight pages of Violante/Moskowitz files in his collection:
* a Tommy Zaino account
* a report attributing the attack to the Son of Sam
* two loitering suspect reports
* a bus driver spotted at a McDonalds who was suspected of being SOS
* the National Guardsman who wore a wig
* the strange man employed by American Express
* a redacted canvasing log
And that's it, correct? Some of these can be found in the folder labeled "Carl" (in poor shape), but also in a separate folder dedicated specifically to police reports.
I realize that might be a lot to ask, given the total number of pages, but I've been up and down the whole thing several times and that's all I came up with.
Thanks again and don't be a stranger.
Thanks, Kenneth! And please feel free to call me Jon. Yes, it seems that I've become something of a surrogate target, and the only thing for which I can properly take credit is digging into the backgrounds of certain suspects whom Maury considered vital to the larger case. Manny and Co. wage their bitter attacks on Maury Terry's memory because they know that if people do scratch below the surface and begin to research those suspects, Maury will be proven right...and, at that point, insults and ad hominem attacks will no longer be sufficient.
DeleteI'm sifting back through the various reports as I type this, but yes, I believe you're right. I look forward to your next post. A couple of years ago, the opposing team attempted to make much of Zaino's oddly self-contradictory interview with the Queens DA's office in 1979, but they never quite managed to explain the contradiction away.
-- Jon
Jon, thank you very much for confirming Maury's Moskowitz files. I didn't want to find out the hard way that the collection was actually larger than I had been led to believe.
DeleteTommy Zaino's 1979 Queens DA interview is perplexing, especially in light of his Unsolved Mysteries appearance and his fairly recent assurance to John Catalano that he didn't believe David Berkowitz was the shooter.
To my ears, in 1979, he sounded like he didn't want to be there talking to Herb Leifer or anyone else on that day - almost as if he would have agreed Big Bird pulled the trigger just to get the session over with as soon as possible. But that's just my opinion.
Zaino did sound ill at ease in that interview. The oddest thing about his statement is that it was sure to elicit a virtual spit-take from Leifer; I don't think that was Zaino's intent, but it was bound to have the effect that it did.
Delete-- Jon