NEW ORLEANS — Multimillionaire murder suspect Robert Durst was ordered held without bail Monday after prosecutors convinced a judge he was a dangerous flight risk who was found with an elaborate disguise, a loaded gun, stacks of cash and maps indicating he intended to run off to Cuba when the FBI caught up to him.
“What I’m telling the court is what I was telling the court in the beginning,” prosecutor Mark Burton, told Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell. “The best indicator of future acts is how one responded, how one behaved when confronted with like circumstances.”
Burton was clearly reminding the court that Durst fled after he was indicted in the 2001 murder of his Texas neighbor, whose body he dismembered and dumped in Galveston Bay.
Durst was arrested at the J.W. Marriott hotel in New Orleans March 14, where he had registered under the name Everette Ward, lying low while HBO aired the final chapters of a documentary that all but fingered him for a California murder case.
The warrant was out of LA for the 2000 murder of Susan Berman, who was gunned down before she could speak with former New York prosecutor Jeanine Pirro’s investigators about the disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathleen, in 1982.
FBI agents recovered his passport and birth certificate, a fake Texas ID, 446 $100 bills, bags of marijuana and rolled joints, a .38-caliber revolver, — and a map folded to show Louisiana and Cuba, along with a flesh-toned latex mask complete with salt-and-pepper hair.
“This was not a mask for Halloween” — it was a disguise “extending down to the chest,” Burton said.
As The Post reported last week, Durst was looking to elude prosecution by running off to Cuba, according to law enforcement sources.
Prosecutors said Durst was also expecting a UPS delivery to his hotel room with shoes, other personal items and another $117,000 in cash. There was also a brand new Nokia cell phone that hadn’t been activated.
A frail Durst, in an orange jumpsuit, and restrained with leather straps connecting his wrists to his waist, stared ahead blankly during the hearing.
Arguing for him to first face the music on the gun charges in Louisiana, where he faces 10-20 years at hard labor, Burton said a conviction on just one of those raps would be a virtual life sentence
for the 71-year-old, and experts agreed.
“The theory is LA doesn’t have its act together and that Louisiana is holding him here in concert so that basically they [LA] can get its act together,” said New Orleans criminal defense attorney
Craig Mordock, who is observing the case.
”He’s pretty much screwed. I think ultimately with today’s no bond and where the case is headed, I don’t think he’ll be a free man for the rest of his life.”
Durst is due back in court April 2, by which time prosecutors may have gotten indictments on the gun charges.
Adding to the drama Monday was a question over the status of a potential witness Jeanine Pirro, the former Westchester County DA who pursued murder charges against Durst after the 1982 disappearance of Durst’s wife Kathleen.
Pirro was in New Orleans covering the case for Fox New Channel, but Durst’s lawyers wanted her removed from court because they planned to call her as a witness.
But the judge denied the defense’s motion to have Pirro testify and she returned to the courtroom with a smile on her face.