ENVY: The Kidnapping and Murder of Sidney Reso

A Man of Means

It wasn't the first time Arthur Seale had parked his van across the street from Reso's home. The truth was, he had for months been conducting a surveillance operation on Reso's house, making mental notes of the executive's habits, memorizing his daily routine.

In fact, for Seale, stalking Sidney Reso had become a full-time job. But that was all right. If everything went the way he planned it, there would be a great payday at the end, a king's ransom, or at least a corporate captain's, $18.5 million, enough to support Arthur Seale and his wife in the manner to which they had been accustomed.

There is no question that Seale and his wife, Irene, were people with lavish tastes. Neither had been born to money or wealth, but they had certainly developed a taste for it. He had gone to a preparatory school while she had been a homecoming queen in high school. And in the early part of their lives together, they tasted a degree of success. A few years before the Reso kidnapping, they seemed to have everything.

Hillside Police patch

The son of a police officer who became a cop himself in the middle-class Union County suburb of Hillside, Seale had experienced some rough patches in his early life. He had, according to published reports, never really excelled as a cop, and even ran into a few scrapes with his superiors, like the time, according to newspaper accounts, that he struck a suspect's mother with his gun during an arrest. But he had left the force under comparatively honorable circumstances, following an injury in the line of duty. He was able over the years to parlay his police experience into a reasonably comfortable life style. He became a security expert and worked for a time at Exxon, helping to develop that company's policy for how to handle executive kidnappings.

Sidney Reso, younger

Even in the 1980s, fear was a growth industry in New Jersey, and Seale's expertise earned him a six-figure salary, bought him a $400,000 house in the North Jersey suburbs, and allowed him and his wife, who ran a local winery, to tool around town in matching white Mercedes.

But as authorities would later discover, Seale's claim to the good life was tenuous at best. In fact, a few years earlier, they had packed up and left New Jersey, and their high paying jobs, to pursue a series of failed business adventures before trying a few get rich quick schemes.