Police arrived at the Sundowner Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nevada, at a quarter to 9 a.m. on Monday, November 10, 1997. The body of 45-year-old Mark Slavin lay in the rear bedroom of room 2017, a laundry bag tied over his head, a belt around his neck and a red Swiss Army knife near his non-dominant hand.
Mark had been brutally beaten and his face was stained with dried blood. His “badly disfigured” nose had pieces of bone protruding from its bridge. Both of his eyes were blackened and swollen shut, and lacerations and abrasions were found along his shoulder, neck, jaw and face. The shapes of his belt — a turtle and a steer’s head — were imprinted on Mark’s neck.
Detectives believed that the crime scene had been staged. Police reports detail bloody drag marks on the hotel carpet and suspicions that the knife did not appear to be in Mark’s possession during the altercation, but was placed after his death.
Mark, long known as “Buzzy” to his friends and Uncle Mark to me, was a lifelong partier enamored with coke, quaaludes and other delicacies. Yet his death came as a great shock — Buzzy was never violent and hadn’t been in the company of any particularly shady associates for years.
Mark Slavin wasn’t actually my uncle, but one of my father’s closest friends and a regular presence in our lives. A few weeks before his death, Mark met my father, brother and me at the now-defunct diner chain Coco’s in Danville, California — just a couple miles north of where my family lived. I was 9 years old and don’t remember much about the dinner itself — it wasn’t abnormal for Mark to meet us, especially if my mom wasn’t around — but I do recall an unusual vibe as I ate what was probably a plate of chicken fingers and a half-diet, half-regular Coke.
There was something both rushed and final about that encounter at Coco’s. My child brain barely registered it, but years later I can feel the off-kilter EQ in my bones.
“He was definitely high. He seemed very animated, and he was happy,” my dad, David Lipsky, recalls of that night at Coco’s. “He’d just come from a job interview or something.”
We never saw Mark again.
Police immediately arrested Jimmy Lerner — a 46-year-old suburban father of two who had most recently been promoted to strategic planning manager for Pacific Bell — for murder. Jimmy later described Mark Slavin as “practically [his] best friend,” but had left Buzzy in anything but a friendly state. Per The New York Times Magazine: “Lerner, who like Slavin had taken an assortment of cocaine and prescription drugs, had in effect tortured his friend.…Lerner’s main injuries, by contrast, were badly swollen hands. His jeans were covered with blood.”
In the months that followed, detectives interviewed Jimmy and Mark’s family, friends and colleagues to piece together the events and personalities that led to the deadly altercation. Buzzy was buried and his community grieved, the sting of his unexpected loss fading as the years went on.
Jimmy Lerner would come back into our lives years later to offer another gut punch — this time, with the release of a “memoir.” You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish arrived shortly after Jimmy was released from a relatively short prison sentence. It was praised for its deft blend of humor, verisimilitude and visceral description of life behind bars; his own “outsider” status in this world made the narrative even more palatable. The book haunted my family for years — not only because Jimmy seemed to be profiting off Uncle Mark’s death — but because he had changed the narrative. Over 400-plus pages, Jimmy Lerner transformed himself from a cruel killer to the real victim in a series of unfortunate events. The book’s mischaracterizations, fabulations and misconstructions were almost as vile as the murder itself. For decades, I’ve wondered: How did this book possibly get published?
