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In the warm light of freedom, Harvey Weinstein made a victory lap around the city, strolling on Park Avenue with his children and stopping by police headquarters, where he honored his liberators, and the Lord West factory, where he was mobbed by most of his 400 employees. Only once was the celebration clouded: when he learned that a man on his payroll was involved. "The most devastating thing in retrospect," Weinstein confessed, "was when one of the officers told me that it was one of my own people."
According to his wife Josephina, Fermin began to change a year ago, beating her in front of their two children and cavorting with other women. Co-workers noticed changes too: Rodriguez had recently begun to brag about returning to the Dominican Republic, where, he said, he planned to build "a big place with an inside pool." Still many found it hard to believe that he would ever have resorted to kidnapping. "He didn't look like the type," says Frank Ramos, a buttonhole-maker at the factory. "And he don't have the brains." Luckily for Harvey Weinstein, Ramos was at least half right.