HE CANNOT REST IN PEACE

It's that time of the year again. Another June 6th to mark the date of his execution by evil.

Today's Blog is In memory of Samuel Wolkoff, My FATHER, My DAD, tortured and murdered at 42 years of age.

He believed in honesty, family, kindness, hard work, ethics, and his rights as a human being to reap the fruits of his labor for himself and our family.

MY FATHER was a courageous HERO. A man who did not run away from the corrupt animals who wanted a "cut of his business" for themselves. He believed in himself and the law enforcement, legal, moral "systems" to protect him from those that wanted the business that he had built from nothing with his blood and sweat.

All of this because he believed in a code of  personal ethics, morality, integrity that dictated honor, respect, fairness, loyalty, faith in humanity, and that no one is entitled to steal from another human being their right to live.

On June 6th, 1958 the world was evil, corrupt, his life was cheap, and scum bags took what they wanted, from who ever they wanted. That was the day they took my father's life, his business, and the souls of my family.

Today, June 6th, 2012, the world is infinitely more evil, corrupt, life is cheaper, scum bags thrive as they take what they want, from who ever they want.

There was no shame in 1958, no conscience on the part of the evil scum that murdered my father. They have all done extremely well financially and life wise for themselves, their families. 

There is no shame today in 2012 as we live in a world where corruption reigns supreme in every part of life, the value of a human life is treated as worthless, and money remains the god that is worshipped by our society.

Yes, my father was a hero, he is a hero who sacrificed his life for his beliefs. Seems old fashioned, naive, for someone to believe strongly in doing the right thing. Yet somehow, he who had nothing, created a thriving business, and maintained his righteousness of believing in goodness, the legal system, and that goodness is rewarded.

In the end, he was dead wrong and paid for it with his life.


Dead heroes, no matter how courageous they are, are not recognized by society for their acts of courage. 

There has and is a pervasive societal process that stinks like a toxic cesspool, spreads as a deadly cancer which pays homage to those who are corrupt, steal, and become powerfully rich with money. Those human beings, who are good seem to be ignored, forgotten, and deemed fools for believing in fairness, a code of respect.

Was it worth it for MY FATHER, Samuel Wolkoff, to stand his ground and give up his life in such a terrifying, grotesque manner at the hands of cowardly pussy punks? 

Was it worth the unimaginable pain that he felt as he was tortured slowly for 5 hours? What must he have been thinking during those horrific hours of going in and out of consciousness?

Was it worth it, my hero, my dear beloved father? Was it worth it?

SAMUEL WOLKOFF IN HIS MEMORY

           HE CANNOT REST IN PEACE

Samuel Wolkoff- June 6th forever etched in my soul. My father was gruesomely murdered on this day many years ago, at the age of 42. I was 10 years old. 

Certain facts in this blog post and also in the book "Blood Relation" have been deliberately edited to protect myself and others. To learn more information from the book, YOU CAN CLICK ON THIS LINK,
OR THIS LINK.

The following are excerpts taken from the book, "Blood Relation":

  BLOOD  RELATION-P.130

"Thanksgiving  morning, 1957, and left on the floor of a parked car in Jersey City. Thirteen  one-dollar bills were fanned out on the backseat above them. The tableau, and the fact that one of the men had taken a bullet in his mouth and one in each eye, led a supervisor to surmise in the Jersey Journal that they'd been killed as payback for a "gangland double cross." Harold's version of events confirmed this. He said that he and a team of mobsters had carried out the killings. The victims had been indiscreet in their handling of a truck full of stolen cobalt, he said, and the Cosa Nostra boss who assigned the hits "wanted to teach every­ one a lesson."

There  was Samuel Wolkoff, whose body had been found on  June 6,1958, in a parking lot near the West Side Highway.He was forty-two years old and a partner in a meat packing company. Harold and two men whom the F.B.I. identified as Genovese soldiers killed him because he supposedly knew the whereabouts of a hoard of stolen cash and jewels to which the Genovese's felt entitled.

Harold had walked into Wolkoff's office on West Fourteenth Street, according to the statements he gave, and claimed to be an N.Y.P.D. de­tective sent to arrest him. He told Wolkoff that a surveillance operation had implicated him in a case, then let him call his wife from a pay phone to tell her he wouldn't be getting home on time. Wolkoff begged not to be put in handcuffs, so Harold held off until they got into his car. Harold's two accomplices were waiting for them in a cream-and-orange Mer­cury.They drove Wolkoff to a house in the town of River Edge, New Jersey, where they alternately tightened and loosened a rope around his neck and questioned him about where the money  and  jewels were. Harold told the others, "This  guy isn't going to tell you anything be­ cause he doesn't  know anything. Let's kill him now." Then, as he re­counted to the agents, he and one of his henchmen took hold of the rope

BLOOD RELATION-P.131

and strangled Wolkoff to death."Subsequent events," an F.B.I. report notes, "proved  that the 14th Street butcher never did have control of any alleged fund."

On and on it went, over the course of two years,with Harold doling out information in bits and pieces, depending on his mood. When he was unhappy with his prison treatment, the Feds would move him to a new facility. Sometimes, once he had established his own participation in a given murder, Harold would narrate in the third person,  referring to himself as "you know who" or "the other guy." In some of the 302s, as the F.B.I. reports are known, Harold says that he was the person who fired the gun, or tightened the garroting rope, and so on. In others, he gives the credit to a collaborator or leaves his own role vague. In the de­scriptions of the latter type of confession, the agents' play-by-play leads to the moment  that Harold and a couple of his thugs are about to commit a murder, then stares elliptically that the victim "was killed" or "was shot," without naming the trigger man.There are also murders he discusses that he claims to have had no part in, explaining that he has merely heard about them.

"The assumption was, he had a primary involvement in these mur­ders he was talking about," one of the F.B.I.agents who visited him told me, and two of Harold 's lawyers confirmed this. "He  wouldn't have survived in the Mafia, because they couldn't have controlled  him. But they put him to work."

Given the sheer magnitude and dimension of the confessions, some people in the government who did not hear them firsthand were initially skeptical. David M.Satz, Robert Kennedy's newly appointed U.S. At­torney for New jersey at the rime, says that when the F.B.I. first mailed him the interview reports, "I thought this guy was just popping off." John Wilgus, an agent charged with  running down Harold's  claims.

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"gunned down in gangland fashion." The Manhattan District Attorney had called Scanlon "the most vicious goon on the waterfront." He had once been charged with opening fire on a Greenwich Village stoop after a girlfriend dumped him, killing a sixty-six-year-old  woman and a teenage boy.

"When I saw the newspaper, I was purely disgusted," she said. "My image of my father was always this wonderful man, good father, good husband. My mother talks about a soul mate. I cried all the way home. I told my husband and he said, 'There was always rumors about your dad and I didn't  mention it.'"

Scanlon's daughter had never heard of Harold either,and had no in­terest in learning more about her father's death."I don't care if the case is ever solved," she said."It's over, it's in the past, but they should hook him into a chair and electrocute him. I'm sorry. I want to meet the man and spit in his face."

She was by turns,impassive,sarcastic,grieving,irritable, and above all ambivalent, even about  the loss of her father. "Maybe we'd have been worse off if my father had lived with his criminal activities and not been killed," she said."I  think my mother thanks God that they didn't do it at the house. She raised five children with good values. There's been no arrests or troubles with the law."

She wanted to know the "nationality" of the name Konigsberg. I told her.  "He  was  Jewish in the Mafia?" she said. "How many people did be kill again? I'll tell you, in my religion, he's not going to heaven with that on his record."

Most recently, I was contacted by Jerry Wolkoff, a man with a surname I immediately recognized. The protracted strangulation of Samuel Wolkoff, his father, was one of the murders Harold had boasted of to the F.B.I.

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Jerry's ordeal was no less excruciating than that of the other sur­vivors. He was ten years old when he lost his father, in 1958.When his father's sister heard about it on her kitchen radio, she collapsed from a fatal heart attack, and the family ended up holding a joint funeral. "I became a husband and a father and I became a social worker, but I have a hard time getting close to people," Jerry said. "I been cut open. My kids are angry with me. They say I taught them how to take when somebody pays you a compliment never to believe them. Well, how do you relate to people when your upbringing was such that when you were a boy your father was tied up like a pig and killed?"

About ten years ago, Jerry began to look into the case, filing requests "with every law-enforcement office from here to Guam," and hiring a private eye. Through these efforts, he was able to glean that the prime suspect had been Harold Konigsberg- a detective let him know surrep­titiously that Harold's name, which he had never heard before, was all over a heavily redacted case file-but that all of the government's in­vestigations had been subsequently left to rot. Eventually, his was, too. "I gave up because after a while none of the authorities would return my messages," Jerry said. "Somebody got killed and nobody cared."

And though Jerry had called me looking for answers and I was able to share some with him in the form of Harold's F.B.I. statements, he still couldn't see the point in holding out any hope for resolution. "It's useless," he said when I visited his house on Long Island. "It's  not going to give me back the past forty-seven years with my father."

In his  dining room, Jerry took a picture frame from the credenza and thrust it at me. It  held a faded photograph of his parents at their wed­ding. "Look at this,"he said.

  
          "Samuel Wolkoff was a person. He Lived."

Samuel Wolkoff's cause of death, 5 long hours of tortured Murder By Strangulation. Try to hold your breath for as long as you can, then wait 40 more seconds, exhale, that will give you a tiny sense of the horrific way my father felt for 5  consecutive hours, a rope tied as a noose, was continuously alternately tightened, then loosened around his neck, while his hands were tied behind his back. Death, when it finally came, must have been a merciful release for my father.

The autopsy showed that my father struggled so bravely to live, that his eyeballs eventually burst, and he finally stopped breathing. His body then deposited at a desolate gas station, in the middle of the night, thrown out onto the ground, as a piece of garbage. Hold that entire scene in your mind forever, it is I can assure you gruesome, and haunting in its profoundly graphic endless replay, over and over in my mind.

Oh, as an aside, his sister learned about his murder on the radio news, she immediately dropped dead of a heart attack in front of her four children.

The family never talked about it for 40 plus years, not even to speak my father's name, it is the taboo secret code followed by many families of victims, as if somehow, the unbearable pain would get less. I have spent most of my life investigating his case and eventually shared it with our family. Never have figured out if I did good or bad by reopening the wounds, but I do know, those are permanent gaping, seeping, toxic, painful holes, they never really were ever closed.

I have been doing more thinking than usual lately, not necessarily a good thing for me, as I yearn to be one of those who are able to practice the art of ignorance is bliss.

How can a loved one who dies suffering, rest in peace, ever? Seems like a simple thing to believe, say, and its even reduced to a short acronym, R.I.P., easy to write. I can't write it, not possible, not after all the never ending suffering of my father, and us.

For an ultra private person like me, a blog is obscenely public, personal, grossly revealing, definitely not my style, but  interestingly, momentarily cleansing, a way of coming out, being up front with unbearable realities, my reality. Mostly I do it for those that can no longer speak for themselves, who experienced unimaginable suffering that ended their lives. In this moment, my father's reality.

When Konigsberg was in prison years ago awaiting trial on extortion charges, he initiated contact with the F.B.I. He began confessing to these F.B.I. agents about these murders, many of which he had committed himself. They suggested the possibility of immunity, but they did not give him immunity for what he told them.  

You’ve got ten murders that I was able to find explicit wriiten confessions to from Konigsberg, and another nine or ten he was aware of. These were cases that for whatever reason the government didn’t want to pursue.   


These unprosecuted and officially unsolved murders of human beings that nobody in the corrupt, cowardly U.S. Justice system  and Government had cared enough to do anything about them. 

To this day, law enforcement has continued to cover up the real reasons why nothing was ever been done to prosecute Konigsberg for these murders. My requests to do so, have resulted in threats made to me by law enforcement officials and then complete arrogant indifference on their part.They didn't prosecute him because of many reasons that only "we" know as the ugly truths. 

I have absolutely no idea, not the slightest clue why over 15,700 people as of this date have viewed my blog. I am sometimes intrigued as to why and what would anyone want to obtain from my words that could bring them here. I see search terms on my blog from people who arrived looking for information about my father, a lot of other interesting search words.

Some of you are the cowardly, but powerfully connected scum bags who murdered my father, as well as those of you in arrogant, incompetent, corrupt law enforcement, whose agencies knowingly covered their asses, and in doing so, betrayed your sworn oaths to defend justice, by participating in covering up the truth, obstructing justice in this capital offense, which has no statute of limitations. 

We all know each other, or about each other, you know I have hidden away safely the written confidential secret official documents with my honest law enforcement and political friends, the written proof of all the detailed real, truthful facts. Nothing to be concerned about, it will remain buried. We all know the deal that protects all of us, the reasons that nothing else has been done by any of us about my father's murder, the reason these documents will remain hidden, is the unspoken but very clear mutual understanding we all have forever, of don't ever again fuck with any of us, and in return, we won't fuck with any of you by making the real truth public.

 Justice not served, justice not given, nothing complicated, nothing new, an innocent, good person, a human life has always been cheap. I did the best I could to obtain that justice. My father's error that cost him his life? He  believed in trust, in the sense of obligation to very close members of his family, by giving them a chance to change their ways. The good deed he did, paid back by these very same, who had him murdered. Horrifically ugly, but brutally true, and they all got away with it, didn't bother any of them, never mattered to them.

 The March continues, May/June are the busiest  months for me, I dread this time of the year, horrifically gruesome memories of human, innocent lives wasted. The rest of the year, the ever present Demons make sure we remember those, whose memories others have tried to erase, these are my family, they  were human beings who will never be forgotten, they lived and never deserved to die in such horribly suffering ways. 

Today we remember my courageous father. He is not resting in peace, that is certain.

Why? Why Him???