One Cent Magenta Read online

  In an instant, Odenweller waved off du Pont and picked up the stamp with a pair of small tongs that he always carried in a pocket. Thus began a relationship that lasted nearly thirty years and included prison visits in which Odenweller delivered news from Stamp World.

  Odenweller and du Pont had more in common than stamps. They were close in age, and Odenweller excelled in things that mattered to du Pont: flying, shooting, and wrestling.

  Still, du Pont had a way of compartmentalizing the people he brought into his life. Odenweller was a “stamp person,” and du Pont did not want a “stamp person” mingling with the others he invited to the estate. Du Pont told Odenweller not to mention his philately to the people he met when he visited. “I was to dissemble to a degree, just to keep them in the dark as to what I was doing, why I was there,” Odenweller told me. “I’d just say, ‘I’m down here, just a friend of John’s,’ or something like that.” Du Pont also insisted on secrecy in the outside world. Once, when du Pont and Odenweller had lunch before a stamp sale in Manhattan, du Pont worried that they would be seen together when they arrived at the auctioneer’s. “You and I shouldn’t appear to get off the elevator at the same time,” he told Odenweller. And above all, despite his wrestling background, Odenweller was supposed to remain separate from the wrestlers who lived on du Pont’s estate—Dave Schultz among them.

  Du Pont and Odenweller were close enough, though, that du Pont’s mother said du Pont looked on Odenweller as the brother du Pont never had. She told Odenweller, “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to John. You’ve done what he wants to do. You don’t need anything from him. Everybody else is trying to get something.” At du Pont’s wedding in 1983, it was Odenweller who escorted du Pont’s mother down the aisle as the ceremony began. (Du Pont filed for divorce after ten months, and his ex-wife sued for $5 million. She alleged that he had not only tried to shove her into a fireplace but had threatened her with a gun.)

  Odenweller’s flying skills were a particularly appealing calling card—and another part of their lives that showed how different he and du Pont were. After the Air Force, Odenweller had risen through the ranks at TWA, putting in his time, just as he had put in his time with stamps and stamp collecting. Du Pont had bought his way into flying, just as he had bought his way into philately—acquiring whole collections the way Ferrary and Hind had, and then filling in the gaps. Du Pont had purchased a helicopter and, with a pilot on his payroll, had learned to fly it.

  One Christmas Eve in the 1980s, TWA assigned Odenweller to fly to Baltimore, about a hundred miles from du Pont’s estate. Odenweller, chatting with du Pont a few days before, said that he was facing a two-day layover. Du Pont asked what Odenweller planned to do for Christmas. Odenweller, contemplating a holiday in a hotel, told him: “There’s not much you can do except stare at the walls and watch TV until you get bored.” Du Pont’s response was immediate: “I’m going to come get you. I’ll bring you up here.”

  Odenweller landed the Boeing 727 and walked to the office where pilots file their flight plans. There stood du Pont, wearing his “chief of helicopter police” uniform. Together they crossed the tarmac to the place where du Pont had parked his helicopter, and soon they were in the air, on the way to du Pont’s estate. Odenweller told me it was an eye-opening visit. He witnessed “the people who worked on the property coming to the landowner—you know, I’m talking medieval times now, coming up with little gifts” for du Pont and his mother. Maybe the rich are different, but not when it comes to gift wrap. Odenweller watched as the du Ponts saved the wrapping paper from each little package, and also the ribbon.

  On December 26, du Pont flew the helicopter to Baltimore in time for Odenweller to go back to work.

  The other person who figured in the life of du Pont and his stamps was Taras M. Wochok, a lawyer who eventually became the unlikely guardian of the one-cent magenta. But that came later, much later, long after Wochok had lost track of Mr. Ducylowicz.

  Wochok’s parents helped Ukrainians who had been held in displaced-person camps in World War II find homes in their North Philadelphia neighborhood— Wochok told me his mother sponsored nearly two hundred Ukrainian immigrants who arrived in the late 1940s. Ukraine had been victimized by the Nazis, who imposed forced labor on Jews and non-Jews alike. After the war, the Soviets sent, involuntarily, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in Germany back home, but eighty to eighty-five thousand left for the United States.

  Wochok’s mother welcomed the new arrivals, offering them a bedroom until they found places of their own. Most stayed only a couple of days. But one remained for several years—Mr. Ducylowicz, a man in his late fifties who worked in the print shop of a Ukrainian-1anguage newspaper for a while. As a teenager, Wochok also worked at the newspaper, translating articles from Ukrainian to English and English to Ukrainian. There was a definite formality in the Wochok household, and Wochok, who was six or seven when the man moved in, was taught to address him as “Mister Ducylowicz.” Decades later, Wochok still referred to him that way, not as “George,” which was his first name. Sitting in the conference room of his law office, Wochok taught me how to pronounce Ducylowicz—“doots-uh-LOW-vitch”—and talked about how Ducylowicz had introduced him to philately.

  Wochok told me he had spent hours watching Ducylowicz sift through his stamps, which were mainly from Germany. Ducylowicz told him that six or seven was a good age to begin collecting and even suggested stamps Wochok could start with. For a while, Wochok haunted stationery stores in the neighborhood, buying packets of canceled stamps from metal racks on the counter. But stamp collecting did not take. Wochok found the process too time-consuming, too isolating. “Baseball cards are one thing,” he told me. “Stamps are quite another.”

  Wochok went on to college at La Salle University in Philadelphia and law school at the University of Notre Dame, and to a career as a prosecutor. By the early 1970s, he was an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia under Arlen Specter, a Democrat-turned-Republican who was serving his second term as the district attorney in Philadelphia. In 1973, Specter put Wochok in charge of his campaign for a third term. Wochok figured that if things went well, he would be tapped to manage Specter’s campaign for governor the following year, or at least to play a major role in it. But on Election Day, things did not go well: Specter lost, though he was later elected to the United States Senate. Wochok went job-hunting, signing on with a medium-size suburban law firm.

  As a prosecutor, he had become friendly with Dr. Halbert Fillinger, a forensic pathologist who was an assistant medical examiner in Philadelphia and knew John E. du Pont. He told Wochok that du Pont had a lot of legal work.

  Fillinger introduced them in the spring of 1973. Wochok said he could not handle outside legal work while he was still on Specter’s payroll. But he told du Pont that he could give him second opinions on specific questions—friendly advice, really, at no charge.

  Soon du Pont was inviting Wochok to the mansion every few weeks. The schedule never varied: cocktails were served at six o’clock and dinner at seven, and there was conversation after that. Those evenings were Wochok’s introduction to the kind of opulence he, like Odenweller, had never been aware of. One night in 1974 or 1975, du Pont said, “After a dinner like that, we ought to have a nice after-dinner drink.” Du Pont led the way to the basement and through a bank-vault door.

  “My first thought is, this is improbable, to see a safe in a basement,” Wochok told me, “but, you know, he’s got a lot of money—I guess I can understand it, except that I didn’t see anything of any value in there except cases of liquor.” Du Pont said some of them had been there for as long as he could remember—some had come from relatives who had died. He pulled out a brandy from 1864. “That’s followed up with a visit maybe a month or two later when he hands me a bottle,” Wochok recalled. “He says, ‘Here, take this,’ and it’s a bottle of champagne from the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary.”

  Forty years later, Wochok still had that b
ottle of champagne, and it remained unopened. (Victor Krievins told me that du Pont had also given him a bottle, and that when he finally popped the cork, it was undrinkable.)

  Du Pont followed Wochok from one law firm to another, assigning him more and more work. Some years, du Pont accounted for 80 percent of Wochok’s billable hours; other years, far less. But du Pont was as secretive with Wochok as he was with Odenweller, and did not tell Wochok everything he was up to. Du Pont did not mention his philately until Wochok had been his lawyer for several years, and not because there was a dispute about stamps but because du Pont wanted a traveling companion. He called Wochok and asked if he were free the following afternoon. Wochok checked his calendar and said he was, and du Pont said, “OK, we’re going to Toronto.” Wochok asked how long they would stay, and du Pont said, “Oh, we’re just going up and back.” Wochok figured that with commercial flights, they would have to spend the night in Toronto, and told du Pont he could not go—he had appointments the following morning that he could not reschedule. Du Pont said Wochok could make the trip and still see his clients in the morning. “He said, ‘I’ve got the Lear. We’re going to take the Lear.’”

  Off they went in du Pont’s private jet. They spent an hour looking at stamp exhibits. They put in an appearance at a late-afternoon reception. “He said, ‘OK, we’re out of here,’” Wochok recalled. “Next thing I know, we’re back on the Lear, back home, and I’m in my house by seven o’clock at night.”

  At some point, du Pont confided to Wochok that he owned the rarest stamp in the world. Wochok told me he was wonder struck: “This was so much more impressive and so much more significant and so much more important that I remember thinking, ‘Gee, if I’d have maybe collected some stamps and spent some time meticulously collecting them, maybe I would’ve found something somewhere along the way.” It is the dream boys had even before little Louis Vaughan.

  Du Pont’s eccentricities worsened with his descent into mental illness in the 1990s. He fired a gun at the ceiling while changing a light bulb. He believed his estate was filled with mechanical trees that slid across the land on orders from unseen remote controllers. He believed there were tunnels beneath the mansion that people used to come and go without being seen. (In fact, there was one tunnel, four hundred feet long, from the main house to the powerhouse, and it was du Pont who would use it during his standoff with the police after he shot Dave Schultz.) He was so suspicious he decided Jean could not have been his mother. His “real” mother had been a maid who he believed had had an affair with his father and had been buried outside the mansion. He ordered a plot dug up. “Of course no bones were found,” the reporters Bill Ordine and Ralph Vigoda wrote in their book about the Schultz case.

  Inside the mansion, du Pont was so sure that people were walking behind the walls that he paid one of the wrestlers who lived on the estate to do just that, to prove it could be done. Someone who wasn’t paranoid—or rich, with a retinue that never said no—would simply have called in an exterminator to set out traps for mice.

  Du Pont was turning into “a Howard Hughes—type figure: long, greasy hair, unkempt beard, his teeth literally rotting in his mouth,” Ordine and Vigoda wrote. “Frequently, he did not shower.” But he could just as easily appear normal, even charming. There was no telling which he would be, the sane du Pont or the insane du Pont.

  The sane du Pont went shopping in a stamp store on the afternoon of January 26, 1996. The man behind the counter who waited on him was Steve Pendergast, a onetime insurance broker who had decided that selling stamps was “a much more interesting way of spending my time.” The first time Pendergast handled a du Pont transaction, he dealt with an assistant named Georgia, who picked up an expensive stamp album and some stamps from the store. Before long, she called and told Pendergast the album was unacceptable. Then Pendergast got another call that began, “This is John.” Pendergast realized who was on the line, and a philatelist himself, he felt his pulse quicken. Pendergast knew that du Pont owned the unique one-cent magenta along with thousands of other important stamps, “but he never talked about it, so I didn’t talk about it.”

  Pendergast told me that du Pont “couldn’t have been more normal” as he left the store that January afternoon. Du Pont told him he would be back on Monday to pick up yet another stamp album.

  The insane du Pont shot Dave Schultz less than two hours later. When Pendergast first heard there had been a shooting at du Pont’s estate, he figured someone had tried to kill du Pont, not that du Pont himself had been the gunman.

  Du Pont never saw the one-cent magenta again, except perhaps on television while he was in prison. A cable program did a segment on du Pont and the stamp, and du Pont’s cellblock buzzed about the famous prisoner with the famous stamp. Wochok told me that du Pont enjoyed the attention.

  The film Foxcatcher was less flattering. It is mostly about du Pont’s fascination with athletes and athletics, his wealth and his deranged behavior—and his murder of Dave Schultz. Stamp World had a problem with the one scene that refers to du Pont’s stamps.

  It is the scene in which du Pont’s helicopter takes off from the lawn of his mansion. Du Pont and Dave Schultz’s brother Mark are aboard, and du Pont hands him the pages of a speech he has written for Mark Schultz to read at an event at which du Pont is to receive an award.

  Du Pont is intent on rehearsing the speech, which calls for Schultz to name du Pont’s accomplishments: “ornithologist, author, world explorer, philatelist.” But Schultz cannot say those highfalutin words. He pronounces the first one “orny-thologist.” The last one stops him completely. “Fuh-lay” is all he can manage.

  “Stamps,” du Pont says, by way of explanation.

  “Can we say ‘stamps’?” Schultz asks.

  “No,” du Pont says, sounding stern. He has chosen the word he wants Schultz to say, chosen it deliberately, and he is determined to make him say it. “Philatelist.”

  Schultz is nervous about standing at a lectern and speaking to a crowd, and du Pont compounds Schultz’s jitters by saying that the audience at the dinner will number four hundred. Du Pont snorts cocaine and invites Schultz to try some. “Well, I’m not so sure that’s such a good idea,” Schultz says.

  Du Pont looks annoyed. Schultz inhales the cocaine, but du Pont has already gone back to rehearsing the speech. And, as usual, du Pont wants perfection.

  “Fuh-LAY-tuh-list,” Schultz stammers.

  “Smoother,” du Pont commands.

  Soon Schultz is tackling the string of nouns, but he skips a few. Du Pont wants nothing left out, and launches into a pronunciation drill as if he were an instructor coaching the laggard in the class.

  “Or-nuh-THAH-luh-gist, fuh-LAY-tuh-list, fuh-LAN-thruh-pist,” du Pont says. “Again.”

  In Stamp World, the problem was not the cocaine but the long A. Steve Carell, the actor who played du Pont, did not pronounce the word as prescribed by every dictionary since the word philately took its place in Webster’s Supplement of New Words in 1880, with an A that rhymes with “cat.”

  ELEVEN

  $9.5 MILLION

  2014: “I Expected to See Magenta, and I Saw Magenta”

  Iunderstand you want to have a conversation with the person who bought the stamp. I will leave you my number,” the message on my voice mail began. The voice was a man’s: deep, powerful, and commanding, one that would have carried to the balcony in a theater or sustained a long career in radio or television.

  “Zero one one, as I’m calling you from overseas,” he said, but he sounded like a New Yorker on a cell phone. He recited a twelve-digit number that began with the country code for Spain.

  When I called back, he answered on the first ring. He said his name was Stuart Weitzman.

  Yes, the Stuart Weitzman who has designed strappy gladiator sandals, sultry thigh-high boots, and dozens of other shoes. The Stuart Weitzman whose creations have been photographed on Kate Moss in ads and Kate Middleton in paparazzi shots—and on Taylor Swif
t, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Charlize Theron. The Stuart Weitzman who refers to first ladies by their first names: “Michelle has bunches of our shoes,” he told me.

  He is also the Stuart Weitzman who was once a boy in Queens with a couple of stamp albums—and who stared at the empty space for the one-cent magenta.

  Now, for nearly a year, the man behind a best-selling sandal known as the Nudist had owned that stamp, which is barely big enough to cover the birthmark on a supermodel.

  After du Pont died in prison in 2010, liquidating du Pont’s holdings kept Taras Wochok busy. He arranged the sale of Foxcatcher Farm to a real-estate developer. The house that Dave Schultz and his family had lived in was leveled, as was du Pont’s athletic training center, but du Pont’s mansion was not. It became a clubhouse and— ironically—the fitness center for a new gated community.

  When Wochok turned to selling off du Pont’s possessions, the one-cent magenta was a priority item. Wochok consigned the rest of du Pont’s collection to a philatelic auction house in Geneva. The one-cent magenta did not go there. Nor did he send it to an American firm that specialized in stamps like Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, which had once counted du Pont as its number one customer. He entrusted it to one of the big names in the auction world—and, specifically, to one man at that firm: David Redden of Sotheby’s.

  I saw Wochok at the auction, but not the buyer. Redden told me that the person who bought the one-cent magenta did not want to be identified. Protecting a buyer’s privacy is not unheard of at high-profile auctions, and at first Redden would not even say whether the buyer was a man or a woman. This complicates matters for reporters like me, trying to write a newspaper article about a record-breaking sale without knowing which pronoun to use. Redden slipped up this time and said something about “him,” so it was a man. The collectors on the salesroom floor tried to guess who had the best poker face—that is, who was not admitting that he was the new owner. A few had bid in the early stages, but they shook their heads when I asked, jokingly, if they had arranged a private signal with Redden that let them stay in the running after they put down their paddles. They rolled their eyes when I said something about bidding by telepathy.