Secrets & Wives. A single mom begins a whirlwind romance…
By: Greg Nichols
Tags: Crime, Short Story, Nonfiction, Movies, Journalism

In the shadow of Kaylen’s attacks and threats by Martin of mob retaliation, Sherry had to get out of Redmond. Martin had poisoned nearly every part of her life, including her lifelong friendship with Samantha. During one of his drunken tirades, he convinced Sherry he and Samantha had slept together. Through it all, Sherry couldn’t escape the fact that she still had feelings for the wild, freewheeling man who swept her off her feet, and the possible betrayal was too much to live with. She severed ties with Samantha, and it would be twenty-five years before they next spoke. Samantha never slept with Martin. It was just another of his lies, tossed around as shields to protect himself.

Near penniless, Sherry took Kris back to her hometown to move in with her parents. Her pregnancy, no doubt affected by the life-and-death stress, ended in a miscarriage. Martin later insisted Sherry had to know more about him than she claimed, including the fact that he was already married. He maintained she seduced him against his will, basically kidnapped him — “she fuck-napped me,” he said more than once — to Nevada to get married in order to try to get his money.

Sherry admits she was painfully naive, but she’s adamant — as are those who knew her — that she was in the dark about Martin’s other lives. He was a professional hustler, a con man, more than capable of getting one over on a gullible lover from small town Washington, and her story is the more credible of the two.

After the fact, Sherry was able to contextualize overheard snippets from Martin’s writing sessions with Pileggi. She realized she had heard where some of the loot from the multimillion dollar Lufthansa heist was hidden. She remains mum on details, but Janet’s dossier on the case showed that Sherry heard the gold was buried under 42nd street in Manhattan. Get your metal detectors out, because that’s the first time that’s been in print.

With the publicity around Martin’s arrest and the release of Wiseguy, Sherry couldn’t help thinking of the man she had spent the past five years trying to forget. It’s hard for her to talk about that period in her life. “It was so devastating I wanted to kill myself, to be quite honest.” She got through it by thinking about Kris and how he still needed her. Introduced by Sande to a movie crew staying at a Hilton she managed, Sherry began doing hair and makeup for film and television shows, and she thrived. She got steady work at a local morning show in Seattle, where she eventually moved.

One morning, Janet, getting great press, as always, came in to make an appearance on the morning show. Sherry came in to do the private eye’s hair and makeup and panicked. “Please don’t tell them who I was married to,” she said, unsure how it would go over with her colleagues.

The reunion brought Janet and Sherry together on different footing, and the former participants in a cat and mouse game nurtured the seeds of friendship planted years earlier. Janet partially filled the void left by the breach with Samantha. It wouldn’t surprise those who know Sherry that she’d be friends with a woman who was once hired to spy on her and bring down her then-husband. “She’s just nice to be around,” says her sister, Catalina.

With a private eye on her side, and freshly motivated to seek closure, Sherry arranged for Janet to help her track Martin down. By this point, he and Kaylen had divorced, and Martin was remarried to a woman in California named Kelly. Janet turned to chasing him once again, this time on behalf of Sherry. Sherry got, as Janet wrote about herself around that time, “the best private detective I knew — me.”

With Janet’s help, Sherry filed a lawsuit seeking compensation for the money he ciphered from her while they were married. Sherry even gave the judge a copy of Wiseguy. Sherry’s attorney, Joy Lee Barnhart, taking on the highly unusual case just a few years into her practice, warned Kris, 22 years old by then, that he’d probably be watching his mother break down in tears on the stand, which Sherry promptly did. But the judge ruled against Sherry, and even ordered her to pay Martin’s legal fees. Sherry felt that Martin’s government connections had pulled strings for him again, shielding him from any consequences for his actions. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Martin never even showed up to court.

Janet took Sherry to see Goodfellas, the Oscar-winning adaptation of Wiseguys. The movie’s unflinching violence frightened Sherry, and when Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill used a line about Kaylen (Karen), played by Lorraine Bracco, looking just like Elizabeth Taylor, the hair on the back of her neck stood up. Martin had used the same line with her. Fascinated with the mobster life dramatized on screen, and still groping to better understand the world that had created her one-time husband, Sherry even accompanied Janet on a trip to New York to attend the John Gotti trial. Gotti, Sherry noticed, seemed to have the same capped-teeth smile as Martin. In the space of a few days, Gotti threw her a kiss and a known wiseguy among the onlookers flirted with her. She hurried right to the airport.

That same year, Sherry did styling for the film adaptation of This Boy’s Life, largely filmed in the town of Concrete, Washington. Robert DeNiro, who in Goodfellas played murderous Jimmy Conway (changed from Burke for legal reasons), was starring. The real Jimmy Burke had been the one who wanted Martin dead and whose lawyers sent Janet to track him down. DeNiro, Hollywood’s Jimmy, found out about Sherry’s previous marriage to Martin Lewis and called her into his trailer to hear her untold story.

Today, Janet lauds Sherry as a survivor. She believes the annulment Martin claimed to get from the Catholic Church was never valid. Sherry can’t recall whether she ever saw paperwork. In that case, according to Janet’s theory, Sherry remains married to Martin Lewis — a man given a social security number and other verifying information by the government, but never declared dead, since he never existed. In a reversal of Martin’s formulation that Henry Hill was married to one woman and Martin Lewis to another, Sherry’s marriage to Henry Hill may have been dissolved, but she remains wedded to the fictitious Martin Lewis.

Sherry saw Martin one final time — it is still hard for Sherry to adjust to calling him Henry, and she wavers between the two in our interviews with her, the only time she or any of the dozens of friends, family members, and law enforcement officials who spoke with us have told the whole story publicly. It was about ten years after their wedding in Nevada when she got a phone call.

“This is Henry Hill.”

“No you aren’t,” she replied. “Henry Hill’s dead.”

She assumed with all the drinking and drugs there was no way he could still be alive. But he started throwing around variations of the F word, which made her reconsider.

“What’s my son’s name?”

The man on the other end of the line answered without skipping a beat: “Kris Gregory Cowin.”

They decided to meet up for lunch at Anthony’s in Everett, Washington, a scenic waterside restaurant. Sherry put her small handgun in her purse and asked a friend to call the police if she didn’t hear from her by two o’clock. If it wasn’t really Martin, it could be one of his old enemies trying to snatch her in a misguided attempt to get to him. If it was Martin, maybe the years of drugs had made him so paranoid he wanted to get rid of her for whatever secrets she might know. At the restaurant, she was comforted to see a table of uniformed police officers who happened to be there on break.

Martin had become a big fan of Sopranos and could critique any episode. He explained that he had recently had a medical crisis during which he almost died. He had a vision that he was at his own funeral and saw the people he hurt financially, mentally, physically. In his vision, Sherry appeared and told him he ruined her life. Martin felt he’d come close to God. He determined he would go around and apologize to all those in his vision.

“I came back and I had a second chance.”

Sherry accepted his apology. He really was two guys: Henry Hill, the callous hustler, and Martin Lewis, a mischievous but sensitive soul whom Sherry, in spite of herself, still missed. Martin lit up a cigarette, even though there was no smoking. “Oh, I’m friends with the manager, he said it was okay for me to smoke,” he explained. The manager came over and kicked them out.

After their meal, Sherry gave Martin a ride when they stopped at a Barnes & Noble, where he signed a copy of his recently published Wiseguy Cookbook, a collection of his favorite recipes. He wrote: You are the love of my life, HH. Sherry, lost in thought, turned around for a moment and when she turned back he was gone. She searched the nearby storefronts and found him in a bar, bragging to the bartender about his wives. “And here comes my second wife,” he crowed.

She dropped him off at his friend’s house by the water. He kissed her hand, saying “I’ll love you forever.” Then he walked away into the dark.

In 2012, he passed away of natural causes, an incredible achievement, all things considered. She’s kept the wedding ring he gave her, which he bought with her money, and the gold-plated phone Kaylen beat her up with.

Kaylen’s fate is more mysterious — although perhaps not unexpected. After she and Martin split up, she chose to disappear from view. Those who knew her in Redmond believe she is surrounded by animals, which is when she was happiest.

Sherry has never fully been able to put her brief marriage behind her, despite everything. “Once somebody has a piece of your heart, I don’t think it’s like a computer where you go in and delete it.” At 68, she feels Martin watches over her, takes care of her the way she briefly took care of him. She’s still looking for “the one,” though she’s no longer meeting men at bars who are pretending to be people they’re not. Now, like the rest of us, she’s meeting people online pretending to be people they’re not.

Sherry recently changed her name, as though in her own private version of Witness Protection. She now goes by Scarlett, along with a last name she’s asked us not to print. She says she’s leaving Sherry Anders behind with Martin Lewis.

“I’m done with Sherry.”

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