Samuel Wolkoff was MY FATHER. Tragically, I hardly remember anything about our relationship as father and son.
Today's Blog is in memory of Samuel Wolkoff, My FATHER, My DAD, tortured and murdered at 42 years of age, I was 10 years old.
It's that time of the year again. Another painfully excruciating grief filled June 6th to mark the date of his execution by pure evil.
A lot of people read my Blog. I suppose they come for many different reasons and I can see they are from all over the world.
There are good people who come here, victims, families of victims, people seeking justice, those who are fighting against injustice, people who care.
There are also extremely evil people who visit here.
They are killers, murderers, organized organized crime family leaders, law enforcement, the curious, sometimes the guilt ridden who are responsible by their actions or inaction's to change the injustices that are specifically detailed in many of my Blog posts.
To me it's very personal when June 6th arrives every year, a very painful day. It has now been 56 agonizing years since my father Samuel Wolkoff was brutally tortured and murdered on June 6th, 1958.
My father 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, supposedly 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, 2014, the world is infinitely more evil, more corrupt, life is cheaper, scum bags thrive as they take even more of what they want, from whomever they choose.
There was no shame in 1958, no conscience on the part of those that murdered my father. Ironically the murderers are still alive. They have all done extremely well financially and life wise for themselves, their families have all thrived.
There is no shame today in 2014, as we live in a world where corruption reigns supreme, the value of a human life is treated as even more 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, his business associates, his relatives, the legal system, and that goodness is to be rewarded.
In the end, he was dead wrong and paid for it with his life.
Dead heroes, no matter how courageous they are, never get remembered by society for their acts of courage. They are quickly forgotten, except by those who loved them.
There has, and is a pervasive societal process that stinks like a toxic cesspool, spreading as a deadly metastasizing cancer, which pays homage to those who are corrupt, steal, and become powerfully rich with others 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 as they repeatedly tightened and loosened a rope around his neck?
Was it worth it, my hero, my dear beloved father? Was it worth it?
SAMUEL WOLKOFF IN HIS MEMORY
HE WILL NEVER REST IN PEACE
Certain facts in this blog post and also in the book "Blood Relation" (see below) 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 herself emotionally, showing deep feelings, extreme turns of 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?"
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."
The
autopsy showed that my father struggled so bravely to live, that his
eyeballs eventually burst, and he finally stopped breathing. His body
then dumped as if it were a piece of garbage, at a desolate gas station, in the middle of the night,
thrown out onto the ground. Hold that entire
scene in your mind forever as I do, 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, painful holes, they never 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? The answer is they cannot rest in peace because of the way they died.
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 our family
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 particular moment, my fathers's ugly reality, our family's deep trauma of unmeasurable grief, unimaginable suffering, that ended our lives.
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 written confessions to from Konigsberg given to the FBI that are in the FBI files, and another nine or ten he additionally confessed to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
These were cases that for reasons, the government didn’t want to pursue, and never did.
These solved murders were never prosecuted, they remain as officially "unsolved" murders of human beings, that nobody in the corrupt, cowardly U.S. Justice system and Government has cared enough to do anything about them, even though they have the written confessions.
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, including the murder of my father, and those who we know hired him.
Harold "Kayo" Konigsberg is now free after spending more than 49 years in prison for another murder he commited. He is currently on parole and living in Florida.
To read more about his parole read my Blog post "I KNEW THERE WAS A REASON"-CLICK HERE.
The two New York State Parole Commissioners Sally Thompson, and Michael Hagler stated nothing on the record about their granting his release.
With good reason. Whatever they might have said would have been an insult to justice.
Sounds strange, even weird, 56 years later why would so much energy and time be spent to make sure that I do not publish the truth of all that really happened to my father.
My requests to do so, have resulted in threats made to me by law enforcement officials and then complete arrogant indifference on their part.The truth is they didn't prosecute him because of many reasons that only "we" know as the ugly truths.
I am often intrigued as to why over 41,000 people as of this date have visited my Blog.
I see search terms on my blog from people who arrived looking for information about my father, a lot of other interesting search words that only "you" would know.
Some of you are the cowardly, but
powerfully dangerous scum bags who murdered my father, some close murderous associates of my father, as well as
those of you in the arrogant, incompetent, corrupt law enforcement systems, 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 comprehensive written confidential secret official documents with my honest law enforcement and political friends, the written proof of all the detailed real, truthful, embarrassing facts that you never, ever want revealed.
Not to be concerned about, it will remain buried, as long as nothing else happens to my family, myself, and other loved ones. We know the deal that protects all of us, that nothing else will be done by any of us about my father's murder, the reasons 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 in my family, 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 stolen without any remorse.
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, not an ounce of guilt on their part.
The March of the dead continues, May/June are the saddest months for me, I dread this time of the year, horrifically gruesome memories of human, innocent lives of my family wasted.
The rest of the year, the ever present Demons make sure I remember those, whose memories others have tried to erase, these are my family, they were human beings who will never be forgotten by me, they lived and never deserved to die in such horribly suffering ways.
Today we remember my courageous father. He is not resting in peace, and he never will rest in peace, that is certain.
I never stop thinking, Why? Why Him???