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.
BLOOD RELATION-P.262
"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.
BLOOD RELATION-P.263
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.
-Amen. Love, Dad.
