(Photo courtesy of Andrew Theodorakis).
Jay Horwitz, the longtime Mets PR chief, wasn’t giving in this time, despite my pleas from the Marriott elevator lobby.
“Christian, whaddya know?” Horwitz said when he answered.
“Hello, Jay. I hear the Mets are getting Santana. Is it a done deal?” I asked. The news was already out that Venezuelan lefthander Johan Santana was on his way to Queens in a trade with the Twins. All that remained was for the two-time Cy Young winner to work out an extension.
But my Daily News bosses weren’t waiting around for the Santana introductory press conference. They wanted a dispatch from South America, preferably an exclusive – a “told The News…” in tabloid parlance – with Santana at his Venezuelan casa.
There was a slight glitch. I was in Washington D.C., and without passport, covering the depositions and House Oversight Committee activities prior to the congressional hearing that would feature Roger Clemens pitted against his former trainer, Brian McNamee. That assignment was quickly shoved to the back burner once the Santana news intensified.
I had scrambled back to the hotel from the Rayburn Building to pack, scroll through the Amtrak schedule to New York, and find an early train Wednesday morning, January 30. Instead of all things Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch, I started going through Santana career stats and Google-ing the history of his Venezuelan hometown. My call to Jay was to try and glean some – any – new intel.
Jay was not having it.
“I’m already making plans to go to Venezuela – do you have any idea if Santana is there?”
“I…I… I just don’t know, Christian,” said Jay. “Sorry, my friend.”
“What about a number for him? Do you have a cell?” I asked.
“Sorry, Christian, I don’t have his number. Did you try his agent?”
If his agent was leaking info about the trade to reporters, I wasn’t in that select group. And it would probably be a cold day in hell before the agent would turn over his client’s personal cell number and Venezuelan address to me.
“Thank you, Jay,” I said. And hung up.
The next morning, the news crackled out of the taxi’s car speaker while we sat in dawn traffic on the way to Union Station: Rudy Giuliani was out of the presidential race… the Patriots and Giants preparing for the Super Bowl… . I was in a daze, already thinking about the travel day ahead, what would be a real-life version of “Trains, Planes and Automobiles.”
I pretty much slept the whole train ride back to Penn Station, and upon arrival, trudged to the old Daily News offices, which were a couple long blocks away on 33rd and Tenth Avenue, the ugly, burnt orange colossus that looked like a building prop from the movie set of “Total Recall.”
Mike O’Keeffe and Nate Vinton, my I-Team colleagues, were already there. I told them I was off the congressional steroid beat for a few days. Then I called JoAnn Ziagos, who was one of The News’ travel department agents and a godsend. JoAnn was used to booking multiple itineraries for reporters – especially sports beat writers – at a moment’s notice. This was a little different. I had no idea what – if any – airlines even operated within Venezuela. Or how close to an airport Johan Santana lived. Or if I’d have to rent a car at some point. Or, most importantly, if there were any Marriotts in western Venezuela. Every sportswriter was always looking to build upon the Marriott points trove.
I gave JoAnn the city names of Caracas and Tovar (Santana’s hometown), and prayed she could come up with something.
My News photographer was going to be Andrew Theodorakis, or Theo, who I had worked with before a couple times. Most recently, he and I were camped out in Tampa during the baseball offseason, awaiting Joe Torre’s fate. The main sports photographers were all in Arizona for the Super Bowl, so Theo drew the Venezuela straw. When I called him, he said he had read up a bit where we were headed, and that the country had a fairly high kidnapping/murder rate.
Awesome.
JoAnn called back 20 minutes later, and got us both Continental tickets for a 3:30 pm flight to Houston that afternoon. From there, we would have a five-hour layover before our flight to Caracas, which arrived at 6:14 am local time Thursday morning. JoAnn said our tickets for a separate flight to Santo Domingo – in western Venezuela and not the Dominican Republic capital – would be waiting for us in Caracas when we landed.
Before I left the office, the Mets beat writer, Adam Rubin, had emailed some possible cell and home numbers for Santana. The office also issued me an international Blackberry phone for the trip. “Try to keep the calls to a minimum,” I was told. A quick stop at my apartment to see my wife, repack, and then it was off to JFK.
Bleary-eyed, Theo and I hustled to our Caracas gate and boarded a twin prop the size of a bathtub. The Houston layover had been brutal, lounging near the gate and nibbling on bad airport grub. I didn’t sleep much on the plane, either, so when we arrived in Caracas, I had to kick it into gear with the Spanish.
The flight took less than two hours to the other side of the country. My aisle seat didn’t afford too much sightseeing, and I was sitting next to a huge dude, anyway. We touched down on an airstrip right out of a Pablo Escobar drug trafficking storyline, but there were a few taxis waiting on the other side of the terminal. Even though gas was about $0.13 a gallon, the driver we flagged did a double take when we said we needed a lift to Tovar – 130 miles north.
Neither Theo or I had much to say in the taxi. I was the only one who spoke Spanish, but sleep deprivation and a three-hour car ride ahead didn’t spark my conversation mojo. Theo snapped photos of the landscape every so often, but besides the click of his camera shutter, the only other interruption was a call from my folks. Somehow, an international signal was available to connect me to suburban Philly from middle-of-nowhere Venezuela.
When we approached Tovar, the city lay out below us in a picture postcard valley. Theo asked if we could pull over for a couple photos, and one of those ended up framing the News’ back page when the story ran. When we pulled up to our hotel for the night, it wasn’t exactly Marriott Courtyard quality. More like a youth hostel, and at $47 a night each, the rooms fit the rate. Behind the bed in my room was what looked like an ant infestation.
We were both spent from the flights and the drive, but it was still light for a couple more hours, so we set out to find Santana’s home after we secured another taxi.
“Sabe donde vive el lanzador, Johan Santana?” I asked the guy. He nodded. Everyone in Tovar probably knew where the famous pelotero lived. We drove for about 20 minutes to the outskirts before we came upon Santana’s compound, a walled fortress with an armed guard stationed in a turret near the entrance. He was already walking toward our taxi, pistol clearly visible in a flimsy holster around his waist, before our driver stopped. Theo had started to snap photos from the backseat as we approached, but he quickly tucked away his camera when he saw the guy packing heat.
I told the guard we were reporters and doing a story on Santana. Was he around?
Nope. Then, in what was a firm, but semi-polite tone, pistol positioned so we could see it, the guard, named Rivero, told us we could maybe get help from Santana’s father, Jesús, who lived back in town. He said he would call Santana’s dad for us.
After a couple moments, he told our driver where to take us. And no, there would be no more photos of Santana’s home for us to take.
Jesús Santana Burgillos came out of a modest townhouse-like home on a back street, big smile stretching across his face. His handshake was like a Marine’s. No, his son wasn’t here. He was in the States. D’oh! But Jesús said he was happy to give us a tour of Tovar the next morning. Meet some of his and Johan’s friends and family. Be ready outside our hotel around 8 a.m.
If the hotel rooms and the rate weren’t already ominous signs, the dinner Theo and I had at the hotel confirmed third-world status. Chicken seemed like a safe bet, but it was rubbery to the point of G.I. Joe toy texture, and it was accompanied by other unidentified sides. Luckily some french fries offered sustenance. Theo and I barely said much – the zombie stage had arrived. After agreeing on a time to meet, we went to our separate quarters. The ant population seemed to be in control, but no sooner had I climbed into bed than the explosions began.
The fireworks were officially for Carnival/Carnaval, the festival before Lent. Theo and I hadn’t researched that part of the culture, and my immediate thought was that a bomb had gone off outside. I frantically called my wife, Beth, using the Blackberry.
She was at that moment out to dinner on the Lower East Side at Freemans, with a group of movie executives, playwright Bob Glaudini, and actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz, to celebrate the beginning of production for “Jack Goes Boating,” the movie version of Glaudini’s play, and which Hoffman would direct.
The phone connection wasn’t great.
“Hi honey, is everything OK?” she asked.
“No, I don’t know what the hell is going on. There are all these explosions outside.”
“I’m sorry… what do you think…” crackle …”Can you go someplace else?”
“No, we’ll figure it out. Love you.”
The detonations lasted another hour, but between the noise and fear of a building collapse, I was pretty much awake until dawn. I searched the hotel lobby for coffee around 7, to no avail. I packed up my stuff and waited for Theo.
Jesús Santana Burgillos (c., gray T-shirt), father of Johan Santana. (Photo courtesy of Andrew Theodorakis)
Santana’s dad picked us up and drove us to the baseball field where Johan played as a kid. Jesús said his son starred as an outfielder, and blasted homers over the right field wall. Other teenage kids were already training on the field, and called Jesús “Señor Burgillos” as he and some of his friends (and Johan’s former coaches) strolled the diamond. There were some funny exchanges between the kids and the adult coaches, and Theo had some cool photos, but I still felt like we needed some drama to the story.
We hung out at the baseball diamond a little longer, then we went back into town, saw a fire engine that Santana and his Twins teammates had donated to the Tovar fire department, and learned about Santana’s charitable Christmas event for kids.
Then Jesús mentioned that he had to leave. That he was going to a bullfight later that evening, in Mérida. Would we want to go to that? He said he knew of a hotel where we could stay.
Oh yes. Yes, we would like to go.
We couldn’t leave Tovar fast enough, and an hour-long taxi ride to Mérida seemed like a vacation compared to the previous 36 hours. The city was already jammed with visitors when we arrived, and the bullfight was apparently the event of the weekend. Our boutique hotel was a major upgrade, but since Jesús had booked a reservation for us at the last minute, he got the last room available – which meant Theo and I had to share. The room, not a bed, thankfully.
Jesús had arranged to meet us outside one of the stadium gates, and he helped us basically scalp tickets to the bullfight. We followed the crowd inside, and we told one of the ticket vendors that Theo was a press photographer. The guy pointed us toward the circular well between the wall and the stands. He would be right next to the action.
(Photo courtesy of Andrew Theodorakis).
I had been to several bullfights in Spain, but the brutality of the spectacle was no different in South America. Nothing pleasant about that bright crimson stain in the arena sand after a bull has been given the sword between the shoulders. The crowd was going crazy and swilling booze at full tilt. Jesús was a few rows down from me, but Theo and I connected with him in between bullfights.
The night ended with us drinking Regional Light beers outside the stadium, and then Theo and I planting ourselves in the hotel lobby to file a story and photos. We had to buy WiFi time by the hour from the front desk. I also had to figure out flights back to Caracas the next morning. There was one flight out of Mérida, with Santa Barbara Airlines. And there was a Marriott on the other end in Caracas.
I tapped away at the computer, leading with the bullfight spectacle. I had received a bunch of emails from New York, and Santana’s extension was pretty much a done deal. In any other circumstance, Theo and I would have celebrated after filing, but we were so drained that we retired to our shared room and collapsed in our separate queen-sized beds. Definitely a top 10 snooze of all time.
The taxi driver that took us to the Mérida airport was either high on coke or had just learned to drive, because he gunned it down these narrow streets with his radio blasting reggaeton, nearly shearing off his sideview mirrors at every turn. When he pulled up to the “departures” section, I asked him in Spanish if he knew where the airport was. “Sí, estamos aquí.”
It looked like the front of a strip mall. We paid him and walked into this open-air terminal, looking for the ticket window. A young woman printed two tickets for us, and told us we had about a couple hours before the flight took off.
News photographer Andrew Theodorakis.
Finally, a twin prop pulled up to the terminal and Theo and I made our way out onto the tarmac. Theo had his own personal digital camera, and he snapped a photo of me in front of the plane before I did the same for him. There haven’t been too many instances where I felt uneasiness boarding a plane, but this was one of them. The aircraft probably hadn’t been inspected since the Carter administration, and the captain stationed outside the cockpit was straight out of central casting for “drug lord pilot,” complete with aviator shades and shaggy beard.
After we were all onboard, the pilot pointed the passengers to specific seats that would effectively distribute the total weight evenly throughout the plane. There were no flight attendants to demonstrate the emergency exits. No videos to explain emergency procedures.
The propellers started up and we taxied down the short runway and took off, straight up over the Andes before banking back toward the north. Once we got to the coastline, I watched the sunset bake the Caribbean. Theo sat across from me and read “Into the Wild.” It was peaceful, and nice to finally not stress about any more reporting. We touched down in Caracas in the early evening and took a taxi to our Marriott, another long drive that included a lengthy stretch overlooking massive slums embedded into the hills outside of the city. When we checked in, the New York copy desk called me to go over a few edits, but the early buzz was that the story and Theo’s photos were a hit. Another News photog had taken photos of Santana in New York, so at the very least we’d have a unique feature to go up against the slew of press conference stories.
When Theo and I checked in at our Continental gate the next morning in Caracas, the attendant told us that we were the beneficiaries of two first-class seats. Dude. I got back to my apartment after the Super Bowl had started, but not even Eli Manning’s magic fourth quarter kept me awake that night.
Almost three weeks after our flight from Mérida to Caracas, I was sitting in our SoHo apartment reading the morning CNN headlines on my computer. One of the smaller headlines detailed a plane crash in Venezuela. The story said the flight had originated in Mérida. It listed the airline and the tail number – Santa Barbara, YV1449.
Theo had emailed me a Venezuela photo dump right after our trip, including the two snapshots of us in front of our Santa Barbara flight. Clear as day in the photos was the same tail number. Same flight that we took. All 46 people aboard – including crew – died in the crash, which occurred right after takeoff. The twin-prop slammed straight into a mountainside.
I’d travel to Venezuela two more times for Daily News stories, in late 2008 when the Mets acquired Francisco Rodriguez, and again in 2012 for a feature on one of the country’s top law enforcement officials working for MLB. Before the third and final trip, I encountered interference from the News’ top editors. “We can’t insure you,” was what I was told, because of all the turmoil going on there.
Seriously?
Insane story. Can’t believe the crash!