Sidney Reso could easily have summoned a driver that day. After all, the 57-year-old was one of the most powerful executives in the nation, a man who started as an engineer and worked his way up through the ranks to become president of Exxon International.
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| Sidney Reso |
But he was hardly the kind of guy who liked to flaunt his power and wealth. It wasn't that Reso shied away from it, or that his wealth and power made him uncomfortable. He was said to have more than $9 million in liquid assets, not counting his $600,000 house in the prestigious suburb of Morris Township, a neighborhood of sprawling homes on three and half acre lots in the rolling hills of Northern New Jersey, and he lived well.
But he was also a man of simple tastes. As one law enforcement official later told reporters, Reso's idea of a good time was curling up on the couch with his wife, a bowl of popcorn, and a rented movie. It may have been that Reso understood that wealth and power had their limits. Certainly, his money and prestige had not been able to stop the deadly AIDS virus from claiming his son's life two years earlier. Or it may simply have been that he never lost that basic bread-and-butter pragmatism and practicality that is so often the defining characteristic of engineers.
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| Morris police patch |
And so he tended to eschew the more flamboyant trappings of corporate power like limousine drivers and bodyguards. Certainly there was also the possibility that someone might target him because of his position. Lunatics, like the so-called Unabomber, who was then still at large, were always a threat. There had also been rumblings of a nascent danger from environmental extremists. And there was always a danger that someone might simply try to abduct a leading executive like Reso for the most venal of reasons, greed. It hadn't been that long before that another Exxon executive had been kidnapped and released after the oil giant paid a $15 million ransom.
Corporate leaders had considered the threat that something like might happen again so seriously that they instructed their security officials to develop a kidnap response plan.
Sidney Reso, by all accounts, was not a reckless man. But he apparently saw no danger in driving himself to work. And so, on the morning of April 19, 1992, just as he had most mornings, he got up and dressed, went out to the driveway, and started his car. He tossed his briefcase in the backseat, and then, in keeping with his morning ritual, walked the 200 feet to the end of the driveway to pick up the morning paper.
As he approached the end of a driveway, Arthur Seale, a man who by all accounts coveted Reso's wealth more than Reso valued it, hopped out of a van parked nearby, and drew a handgun. Though Reso was not a physically imposing man — he suffered from heart problems — he struggled, and as he did, either by accident or design, Seale's gun went off, wounding Reso in the arm.
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| Arthur Seale photo ID |
His kidnapper then trundled the wounded executive into the back of the van where he was secured inside a coffin-sized wooden box made especially for the purpose. Reso, a husband, proud father of four surviving children and the grieving father of one, would spend the rest of his tortured life in that box, his weakened heart struggling to keep him alive in temperatures that by most estimates exceeded 100 degrees, surviving on nothing but water, and with nothing to ease the anguish of his confinement and the untreated wound in his arm except for Tylenol and sleeping pills.
He survived just four days.
But his kidnappers, avaricious and by all appearances heartless, would continue to torture Reso's family, his employer, and the community at large for almost two more months, pretending that Reso was alive and demanding millions, $18.5 million to be exact, in ransom for his release.
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