Lorenz makes the amazing claim that she lived with an Amazon-rain-forest tribe for nine months. Valerie Lorenz confirms that her sister was “in Venezuela for a long time. She talked about the jungle for years afterwards, and how she tried to flag down planes.”

John Stockwell, a renegade former C.I.A. agent who was one of Marita Lorenz’s erstwhile biographers, says that while he feuded with his subject over some of her stories, “her wildest tale, the jungle saga, turned out to be true. It’s chock-full of convincing detail.”

Lorenz spent most of the next decade in Yorkville, Manhattan’s German neighborhood, around the corner from her mother. She resumed working as an informant for the F.B.I.’s political division and for the New York Police Department’s 23rd Precinct. Lorenz lived at 250 East 87th Street, a building which she says housed many of the staff of the Soviet Consulate, as well as those of other Eastern-bloc consulates. After spending her days sifting through the building’s garbage, the nights were hers. In 1966 she met another Latin-American strongman, Nicaragua’s future dictator, Anastasio Somoza. “Everyone thought that Tachito and I had an affair,” she says, “but we didn’t. Just friends. We talked about fixing up Monica, when she got older, with his son Luisito.”

She tried twice more to visit Pérez Jiménez, in Madrid, but both times she left without having laid eyes on him; the second time, she was summarily escorted back to the airport.

In the mid-60s she married a moody Cuban with whom she had had a torrid fling. She says that “it lasted two weeks,” and that she got an annulment. In 1969 she had another child, a son named Mark, the offspring of another ill-fated romance. She has claimed that the father was “a dumb fucking Irish hump,” a former New York City police chief. However, most observers, including her sister, believe that Mark’s father was Eddie Levy, a small-time gangster who served a sentence in Florida for insurance fraud. In fact, Valerie testified at a paternity hearing that Levy was Mark’s father. “I was there the day Marita decided to change Mark’s dad,” says John Stockwell. “She simply told Mark it was better to have a father who was a cop than one who went to jail.”

Further complicating this dizzying spiral of relationships, Marita was married briefly to a third man, Louis Yurasits, the building superintendent at 250 East 87th Street, whom she also has on occasion identified as Mark’s father.

Monica Mercedes Pérez Jiménez Letelier is a 31-year-old green-eyed stunner with one of those killer bodies created in a gym. “She’s a dead ringer for her father, Pérez,” says Frank Sturgis, and indeed the resemblance is striking. A bodybuilder who has posed for Playboy, she was recently a finalist in the Miss Fitness U.S.A. contest in Las Vegas. She is also the mother of a two-year-old boy, the child of her marriage to Francisco Letelier, an artist and the son of the late Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean ambassador to the United States, who was assassinated on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., in 1976. The couple is no longer together. “I feel terrible,” Marita Lorenz says. “My old ops killed his father. Terrible.” Indeed, the Novo brothers—who Lorenz alleges escorted Oswald to Dallas—and Virgilio Paz, all anti-Castro activists, were indicted for the murder of Letelier. Paz and Guillermo Novo were found guilty, but through a series of appeals and technicalities, Novo was eventually acquitted of the murder.

“My mother came from a concentration camp,” Monica is explaining to me over lunch in Beverly Hills, “so her desire to be loved was very strong.” Blithely comparing today’s rock stars to the Latin generales of the 50s and 60s, she says, “Castro was the big, glamorous hunk at that time. It was like being with Bon Jovi or Patrick Swayze. My mother was a dictator groupie.” To her mind, Marita has always been singularly apolitical, a woman guided by simple, romantic impulses and a searing need to be protected. “She was a power junkie,” Monica says matter-of-factly. As for her mother’s lifelong career of spying and informing, Monica says with a shrug, “That was just her job for money.”

Monica has no memories of her father, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, nor has she seen a peseta of his multimillion-dollar fortune. She also has only “the vaguest images” of her life as a two-year-old in the Amazon. Ḥowever, she suspects that Pérez Jiménez masterminded their trip. “I think it was my father who arranged that,” she says between ladylike sips of white wine. “My father is totally capable of having this woman and her child killed. He’s a dictator. Why not, man?” Aware that her mother blames Pérez Jiménez’s lawyer, David Walters, for their jungle adventure—which Walters has denied any part in—she says diplomatically, “This is where we differ. Sure, I’d like to believe that it wasn’t my father. . .”

When Watergate broke, Marita Lorenz instantly recognized most of Sturgis’s fellow plumbers as “the usual suspects” from the Op 40 gang. There were Eugénio Martínez and Bernard Barker, Sturgis’s close friend, who had been Howard Hunt’s deputy during the planning of the Bay of Pigs. She guessed there would be plenty of singing and plea bargaining.

In 1975, after doing a 14-month jail stint for Watergate, Frank Sturgis decided to tell all about his life as a double agent, including his and Marita Lorenz’s attempts on Castro’s life, in a series of stories by Paul Meskil in the Daily News. “I never wanted anyone to know about my life with Castro,” Lorenz protests. “He did it. That bastard is my downfall.” It wasn’t long, however, before she was telling her own tales to Meskil, including a chaste rendering of her life with Castro, who she claimed had kept her a prisoner until she was rescued by Sturgis.

In 1976, Tom Guinzburg, then president of the Viking Press, read the Meskil stories and saw a blockbuster book in Marita Lorenz’s story. “We gave her and a co-writer a $320,000 advance,” he says, “which was a huge amount of money in those days.” The book, however, came to naught, because Viking had recently been sold to Penguin, and the new owners decided to abandon the project. Nevertheless, Guinzburg says, he became quite close with Marita, and still hears from her on occasion. “She was very attractive, very convincing,” he says. “We checked out all her stuff, and no one said she was not who she said she was. When I met Marita, she was sifting through the garbage at the Bulgarian Consulate. Her gas, phone, and electricity were always off, because she couldn’t pay her bills. I think she spent her entire advance in around an hour and a half.”

Over time, Guinzburg noticed something “skewed and jumpy about her. The level of paranoia was acute, and she was a grievance collector, for sure.” While Lorenz’s detractors have spoken about her predatory approach toward men, Guinzburg says he saw no evidence of her being opportunistic. “Her impulses were very generous,” he says, “but she was a total sucker, and could be taken in by anyone.” Robert Yaffee, a computer consultant at New York University, who has known Lorenz since the mid-70s, agrees only in part. “It’s true she is a victim,” he says. “But she’s a victim who victimizes others. There are very few men in Marita’s life that she has not turned against, from Castro to Sturgis to Stockwell. . . all her husbands—just about all of them.”

In 1977, Marita Lorenz claims, Frank Sturgis showed up on her doorstep, eager to jump-start their old friendship. “She’s always had this love-hate thing with Sturgis,” Valerie Lorenz explains. Marita admits to being awed by Sturgis’s bravado. “We were walking down York Avenue,” she says, “and Sturgis was bragging about all his exploits. So I asked him, ‘Did you kill Alex?’ He said, ‘Alex took too many pictures.’ Then he told me, ‘We can kill anybody we want. Just blame it on national security.’ He said columnist Dorothy Kilgallen ‘got whacked’ because of her intention to publish a book which included information from her exclusive prison interview with Jack Ruby.” With Sturgis spilling the beans so freely, Lorenz cranked up her nerve for the $64,000 question. “I asked him about Kennedy. He says, ‘So what if I fucking did it? Who’s gonna prove it? I have a fucking alibi. I was home watching television.’ And he starts laughing: ha, ha, ha. And he says, ‘You missed the big one, Marita.’ ”

According to Lorenz, Sturgis suggested that one way for her to dodge the House hearings was to leave the country. “He wanted me to infiltrate Fidel’s military advisers in Angola,” she says, a charge Sturgis denies. “He warned me that if I testified I would be killed.” From the heated exchanges between Sturgis and her mother, 15-year-old Monica learned that Sturgis was planning to come by and “straighten things out” on the afternoon of October 31, 1977. With a pistol borrowed from a friend’s brother, Monica waited for him outside her apartment building. Someone phoned the police, who talked Monica into giving up the gun. Hours later, when Sturgis did appear at the apartment, he was arrested and charged with aggravated harassment and coercion.

Sturgis says that his arrest was “a setup,” that he had flown to New York at Marita’s request and that she had even paid for his plane ticket. He sued the city for false arrest, and actually won a $2,500 settlement. He says further that he never told Lorenz to avoid the hearings, that he never believed that Dorothy Kilgallen was murdered, and that he had nothing to do with the disappearance of his friend Alexander Rorke.

In December 1977, Alice Lorenz died from an “unknown paralysis.” Valerie recalls her mother’s accusations in the hospital. “She kept saying the C.I.A. had done it,” she says. “Something about an injection.” Marita, who sat with her mother till she died, says, “She knew too much. They gave her a shot. Same as they gave Jack Ruby.”

“My grandmother had kept my mother intact,” says Monica. “After she died, everything got very bad. We went on welfare. We had no money, no electricity or gas—once for six weeks.”