This is how my family made its money. In May, 1955, my grandfather Leo Konigsberg started a wholesale food business in Bayonne, New Jersey: one delivery route, one driver, and two trucks. He added an afternoon route and drove it himself, dropping in on his high-volume customers—grocery stores and restaurants—to see if anyone was running low and needed something on the spot. That was what Leo liked most about being a butter-and-egg man, getting out and seeing clients.
At first, Leo ran his business out of his home, storing nonperishables—pickles, mayonnaise, and shortening—in his garage, and perishables in two walk-in coolers he rented in Jersey City. In time, he was able to pay his father rent on a space he used as a warehouse and office. As he frequently reminded his children, the only free thing he ever accepted from his relatives was a driveway for his trucks. He built a successful outfit, and if you drove through Hudson County in the nineteen-sixties or seventies you probably saw the red trucks with “Leo L. Konigsberg Foods” lettered in cursive across the front.
Leo was fanatical about his reputation. Everyone knew he wouldn’t accept goods that had fallen off a truck. If he ate in a customer’s diner, he refused to take a cup of coffee on the house, even if it embarrassed his host. He was consumed by the anxiety of having to demonstrate his uprightness.
One night in 1958, Leo returned from his route and was met in his office by three men; two of them had stockings over their faces and one shoved a crowbar into his ribs. They made him open his safe, which had more than two thousand dollars inside, then tied him up. The police who arrived on the scene afterward gave Leo a hard time, “as though he were the one who’d done something wrong,” my grandmother recalls. Leo had never once stayed home from work, but he spent the next day in bed, sick to his stomach. What upset him most was the headline in the Bayonne Times: “KONIGSBERG’S BROTHER VICTIM OF SAFE ROBBERY.”
Internal memos from the United States Department of Justice allege that Leo’s baby brother, Harold (Kayo) Konigsberg, committed more than twenty homicides in the service of organized crime; some of his acquaintances put the total at more than fifty. “For years, police and federal agents considered the hulking Kayo the most dangerous uncaged killer on the East Coast,” Life reported in August of 1968. It quoted a government official who described him as “an animal on a leash” for the Mafia and said, “All they had to do was unsnap the leash and he’d kill for the fun of it.” An accompanying photograph showed three officers clutching at Harold’s jacket, fighting to prop up his head for a booking. In the picture, he appears to weigh upward of two-fifty. He has wavy, dark-blond hair and a face like a veal cutlet. He looks at peace.
Unlike a typical Mafia contract killer, who answers to a hierarchy of bosses, Harold was freelance and would work for whatever family had hired him. People who came into contact with him—prosecutors, detectives, defense lawyers, underworld figures—reach for the same oxymoronic superlatives: “smartest hit man” and “toughest Jew” (this a generation after the Jews had got out of the business, or, at least, like Meyer Lansky, limited their activities to the white-collar end). The Justice Department considered him the king of all loan sharks; conducting business out of a half-dozen offices in midtown Manhattan and in Jersey, he claimed to have a million dollars on the street at any given time. He taught himself to read as an adult, he said, and he served as his own lawyer in two major trials. Later, he wrote many of his own appeals, one of which got as far as the United States Supreme Court. The amount of time and energy he spent thwarting the government once he was locked up was perhaps what was most unusual about Harold. The story of this mutual antagonism is a window on not just his criminal mind but also the Feds’ tender-footed efforts to fight the Mafia in the sixties, the beginnings of a battle that lasted thirty years.
The event that set in motion Harold’s undoing occurred in 1961. That winter, a power struggle within the Local 560 chapter of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters pitted a reform-minded faction called the Green Ticket against the union president, Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, who had been extorting money from member companies and issuing sweetheart contracts. When Tony Pro suspected that the Green Ticket was promoting the chapter’s popular secretary-treasurer, Anthony Castellito, to run against him for president, he decided to have Castellito killed.
Tony Pro had a lot at stake. Local 560—headquartered, appropriately enough, in Union City, New Jersey—had thirteen thousand members (mostly truckers) and was one of the most influential labor locals in the country. He had a yearly income of around a hundred thousand dollars (which put him up there with his mentor, the Teamsters International president, Jimmy Hoffa), and he had designs on skimming another two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the union treasury if reëlected.
In his spare time, Tony Pro was a caporegime, a Mafia lieutenant, in the Genovese crime family, so assembling a team to carry out the murder was easy. Harold came first, followed by Salvatore (Sally Bugs) Briguglio, a Genovese soldier. Sally Bugs was trim, wore glasses, and had served a hitch in the Army. Salvatore (Big Sal) Sinno, a bookmaker in Hoboken, joined them. Big Sal was six feet three, had a Roman nose and a pompadour, and had spent time working as Tony Pro’s bodyguard. Tony Pro offered Harold fifteen thousand dollars for Castellito’s murder, and both he and Big Sal were promised some of Tony Pro’s take from the union. Sally Bugs, for his payment, was going to be employed as a business agent of the Local 560—a guaranteed position on the Teamsters’ gravy train.
The plan was to ambush Castellito at his country house, in Kerhonkson, New York, about two hours north of Manhattan. Around 9 a.m. on June 5th, Castellito parked his car near the Local 560 building and was approached by Big Sal. According to court testimony and F.B.I. interviews with some of the principals, Big Sal told Castellito that Tony Pro had a friend who was on the lam from authorities. As a favor to Tony Pro, Big Sal asked, could he let the lamster hide out at his farmhouse for a few days?
Castellito agreed; he was eager to appear friendly toward Tony Pro, and he was sympathetic to life on the wrong side of the law. He himself had made money off illegal gambling and shylocking. He and Big Sal picked up the purported lamster—actually a longtime enforcer for Harold—and they headed north on the New York State Thruway.
In photographs, Castellito’s retreat suggests the Mob pastoral ideal: prefab, with a screened-in flagstone porch and a long driveway separated from the road by a chain. “We had a hundred and forty-eight acres, seven horses,” says his son, Anthony, Jr., who was twenty-six at the time. “My father liked to cut the grass and bale hay. He loved that better than coming into Jersey City with his Cadillac.”
Harold and Sally Bugs were hiding inside Castellito’s house. When Castellito came in through the kitchen, Sally Bugs immediately struck him on the back of the head with a piece of lead-filled hose. It wasn’t enough to knock him out, and he fought back. So Harold strode to the porch and ripped a length of cord from the venetian blinds. Sally Bugs and Big Sal drew it around Castellito’s neck and pulled. In a minute, it was over. Harold buried Castellito’s corpse some hundred and forty miles away, outside of Freehold Township, New Jersey, near a dumping ground.
Harold went to Tony Pro’s office a week later. By way of an alibi, Tony Pro had flown to West Palm Beach and married his girlfriend on the day of the hit. Now Harold threw an arm around him and kissed his cheek.
“Very good,” Tony Pro said. He handed Harold an envelope.
The same week, state authorities questioned Harold and Tony Pro about the disappearance, but found them unhelpful. A search of Castellito’s property turned up no promising clues, and the case was left unsolved.
Over the next several months, Tony Pro was comfortably reëlected president of Local 560 but never gave Big Sal the payoff he’d promised. Soon, Big Sal went missing and was presumed dead.
Tony Pro seemed to be embarking on a cleanup operation. He withheld Harold’s piece of the union profits, too, and in December, 1962, set a trap for him at the Cabana Club in North Bergen, New Jersey (one of many clubs and hotels that Harold had taken over in lieu of loan payments). Upon entering, Harold could see Sally Bugs peering out from behind a curtain and Tony Pro’s brother behind the bar. Instead of retreating, he tore through the kitchen, pulled a stove out of the wall, and barricaded the door. Tony Pro’s boys tried to coax Harold out, begging him to talk things over, but for five hours he wouldn’t budge. Peering through a barred window, he eventually saw an insurance man he knew, and persuaded him to pry the bars open with a tire iron. As Harold fled, Tony Pro’s crew started firing. He was hit, but he flagged down a passing motorist and paid him twenty dollars for a ride home.
According to one of my grandaunts, Harold’s mother-in-law was visiting. “Come upstairs,” he told his wife, and when he took off his sports jacket she saw that his shirt was soaked with blood. He was taken to a safe house, where a Mob doctor extracted four bullets and thirteen buckshot pellets from his body.
Before long, the Mafia’s higher-ups declared Harold off limits; his services were too valuable to lose. Blessed with plenty of other Mob contacts, he went on with his work. And for a long time he did not give another thought to the body outside Freehold Township.
My granduncle’s life is something my family went to considerable lengths to conceal. I first heard of him from a groundskeeper at my boarding school who had once been a policeman in New York. I tried bragging about my discovery to my classmates but received blank stares, and I did not mention it again. Then, in 1995, I was researching a story on a murder case when a former detective asked if I was related to “the famous Konigsberg.” I’d forgotten about Kayo long before and assumed he meant Woody Allen.
I telephoned my father. “That’s my Uncle Heshy,” he said. “Please tell me you said you weren’t related. Why would you want your name—our family name—attached to someone like that?” He told me to drop the assignment and never to write about the Mafia.
My father said that Heshy wasn’t really part of our family, which—as far as something to identify with—consisted only of my parents, my brother, and me. I was six years old when my father completed his surgical residency and we moved from New York to Omaha, Nebraska. Still, I was surprised by his reaction. Our family is as generic as Midwestern Jews come, and I’d never heard him use a grand-sounding expression like “our family name.” I felt a detached thrill to know we had a criminal in the family, but I didn’t expect others to see it that way, and I haven’t brought myself to tell most of my friends. Early on, my feelings alternated between perverse pride and something not quite its opposite.
One night in 1997, I received a voice mail:
My father confirmed that it was Heshy’s voice. Heshy had apparently learned that he had a journalist for a grandnephew, and called from Auburn Correctional Facility, in upstate New York, where he was serving a life sentence for murder.
Heshy was Harold’s Yiddish name. He got the nickname Kayo—as in K.O.—from a stint as a semi-pro boxer. He was also known as Boom Boom, the Bayonne Bomber, and Hershy—the last apparently a Gentile’s corruption of Heshy. It stuck, and he sometimes passed out Hershey bars when he introduced himself.
Kayo Konigsberg was a model for two fictional characters: Cagney Cohn in “Bar Tales,” a 1973 short story that Sidney Zion published in The Antioch Review; and Albert (King Kong) Karpstein, the antagonist of Peter Maas’s 1979 novel, “Made in America.” Both portray a Jewish gangster out of Jersey, hit man of the first tier and loan shark of last resort. Karpstein’s humanizing vice is a Milky Way habit, and an associate calls him Milky. Cagney Cohn is “a guy whose very existence could turn you into an atheist, since if there is a God then why is there a Cagney Cohn.”
“Something about Harold I just fucking love,” Zion reminisced not long ago at the Yale Club, where he introduced me to his friends as “Kayo’s nephew.” “He says ‘Olev hasholem’ every time he talks about one of the guys he killed.” Zion squinted at me appraisingly. “He could scare the hell out of someone just by looking at him. I don’t think you could do that.”
I was often pressured to share people’s affection for Harold, as if he were an endearing eccentric, a pet monster. “Once you’re involved with Harold, you get to know a lot of Haroldkeit,” Ivan Fisher, one of his lawyers, said. “You know, like Yiddishkeit? This was a guy who could, on command, froth at the mouth. He’d say, ‘Here, let me show you something.’ He was my first true sociopath, and brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. But he could be just adorable.”
Harold, according to myth, survived seventeen gun battles. He could run his thumb along a roll of bills and tell if a twenty was missing. He always ordered two steaks at once. Collecting on a loan in Newark, he ripped a metal leg off a barstool and beat the daylights out of a couple of thugs in the club. The two detectives who showed up tried to break one of the legs off but found that, even together, they couldn’t so much as bend it.
Harold’s lawyer Raymond A. Brown, who still practices in Newark, told me, “Hershy was my favorite client. He made Frank Sinatra sing for my wife at one of his clubs.” In defending Harold, Brown lost only once, a federal hijacking case in 1963. Many nights during the trial, the government later discovered, Harold was out late shaking down his debtors; during the day, he nodded off in the courtroom. Brown, a star orator, played the room like a Pentecostal. “I work up to my summation,” he recalled. “I say the case is so unjust I’m amazed this eagle on the flagpole hasn’t screamed in protest. Right at my magnificent pause, Harold farted. The whole place turned, and there he was, off to sleep, wiping his mouth with his hand.”
No less an arbiter of rogue decency than Murray Kempton was captivated, at least initially; he wrote three columns for the Post about the fits Harold was giving the government. “The image of Harold (Kayo) Konigsberg has sat intactly enormous in the mind through years while the legends of Robert McNamara and Adam Clayton Powell have withered away,” Kempton wrote in March, 1967. He warned, however, “There are few worse mistakes than the close-up inspection of one’s heroes.”
Auburn Correctional Facility is the oldest prison operating in New York State, a maximum-security prison built along the lines of a medieval fortress, with a copper minuteman standing watch from a crenellated tower. I made my first visit to Auburn to see Harold in the summer of 1998.
I waited in the visitors’ center before a cardboard backdrop of a beach scene. To my right were the window partitions and handsets used for no-contact visits, a couple of lipstick kisses on the plate glass. A heavy steel door opened, and there was Harold, in forest-green prison garb, and work boots. He is five feet nine, and fat around the midsection, with bandy legs, hooded blue eyes, and thick white hair like my grandfather Leo’s.
I extended my hand, which he ignored. “What the fuck kind of way is that to greet family?” he said, and gave me a kiss on the mouth. Then he asked after all my cousins by name, people he’d never met. He was showing off.
“It’s a funny thing,” he said. “Family don’t seem to mean anything anymore.” He had not, he said, received a single condolence card when his wife died, two months earlier. “After my mother died—may she rest in peace, God rest her soul—my brother and sisters sat shivah for me like I was dead.”
He had me buy him four Dr Peppers and two ice-cream sandwiches. One of the ice-cream sandwiches got stuck in the vending machine, and a guard helped me pull it out. “What are you, a cripple?” Harold said.
My granduncle is as strong as an ox and looks healthy, although he explained that he suffers from emphysema. He said he could have got out long ago but has repeatedly turned down offers to testify against other mobsters. “The windup is, you think your freedom is worth your self-respect?” he said. He burped, like someone who could burp the alphabet. “Listen, I used to be somebody. I used to have the power of life and death. You know what that means? It means the government didn’t decide, we did.”
“Decided what?”
He rolled his eyes, annoyed. “Oh, you couldn’t believe the kinds of things we decided. This thing won’t die.” (This thing: the Mafia.) I thought of what Robert Stewart, a former organized-crime prosecutor in New Jersey, had said when I told him I was writing about Harold: “Do you want to get yourself killed? I wouldn’t want him reading my name saying something he doesn’t like.”
I asked Harold why he’d solicited me. “I’m thinking about taking the story of my life and fictionalizing it some,” he said, spreading his hands out wide. “Then we sell it to those Weinstein brothers at Miramar.” The title he had in mind was “From the Ashes of Hell to the Power of Heaven.” “The ashes part involves running up against a greater power—Robert Kennedy persecuting me.” The power of Heaven would come when our hero is released from prison and reunited with his family. “And the windup is. . .” He paused. “The windup is a lot of fucking things.”
He proudly claimed that, in 1968, Random House, Time-Life, and M-G-M had together offered him a large sum of money to collaborate with a writer. “You think if I didn’t do it for Bennett Cerf I’m gonna do it for a cocksucker like you for free?” he erupted, pounding the table. I flinched. “I ain’t gonna hit you,” he said, suddenly calm. “You know you got your grandfather’s nose?”
But Harold did talk to me, through ten visits over three years. I have learned about things I have no idea what to do with, including crimes he was never charged with. I assure myself that the fact that we are related is unimportant, and I am free to write about Harold as a journalist. But I cannot doubt that he told me what he did only because I am a blood relative. And, because I am a blood relative, much of what I have learned I wish I didn’t know.
My great-grandparents Mendel and Fannie Konigsberg emigrated separately from eastern Galicia (now in Ukraine) and met in Bayonne. They spoke Yiddish and English with their children, and Polish to each other when they didn’t want to be understood. Mendel was five feet six but rugged, with enormous workman’s hands. He had a contracting business, and in 1930 he poured the concrete that anchored the New Jersey side of the Bayonne Bridge, which connects the city to Staten Island.
Heshy was the youngest of five children, said to have weighed an astonishing thirteen pounds at birth, in 1927. He had blond ringlets that his mother did not cut until he was three years old, and then saved in a canvas bag in their living room, which is where they sit today. “It was like Samson,” his sister Ruthie says. “Except the minute they cut the hair he became the Devil.”
Harold told me that when he was thirteen, in a fight over control of a neighborhood crap game, he pulled a gun on an older Italian boy whose father was affiliated with the Black Hand (a precursor of the American Mafia). The altercation ended once he emptied the boy’s pockets. “I had no idea at that time what was organized crime,” Harold recalled. “I began to understand.” He smiled.
Mendel, as was inevitable for someone in construction, had a working acquaintanceship with the Mob, and when it was clear that his boy had messed with someone from the wrong family, he took him to see Abner (Longy) Zwillman. Zwillman was one of the biggest gangsters in the country, the man who turned gaming and bootlegging into Mob staples and in effect gave organization to organized crime. He was tall and good-looking. He had dated Jean Harlow and kept a lock of what he said was her pubic hair in his wallet to show friends.
Zwillman looked approvingly at Harold, who was nearly full grown, and put him to work at fifty dollars a week. Harold and his friends corralled all the alcohol business between Twenty-fifth Street and the Hudson River in Bayonne and learned how to run numbers. Soon, Harold was making more money than the rest of his family put together.
Harold became Zwillman’s driver and bodyguard. For Zwillman, there had been no Great Depression. He lived in a Tudor mansion in West Orange, with menservants in the kitchen and a study full of law books. “You could ask for anything at Longy’s house and it’d be there,” Harold said. Although Harold was sixteen when he dropped out of school, he had not yet completed eighth grade. By the time he was twenty-three, he had been arrested twenty times, mostly for robberies and assaults.
Harold’s sisters have always characterized his outlaw career as something completely independent of the family, as if a mutual abandonment occurred the first time he skipped heder. But Mendel himself operated a small bootlegging operation from a still in his attic, producing slivovitz, hundred-and-eighty-proof plum brandy. One day, when Harold was in his teens, he and Leo helped their father stow twenty single-gallon cans of slivovitz under the floorboard of his Dodge and accompanied him to the Lower East Side, where a rabbi had a standing order. Just outside the Holland Tunnel, Leo was pulled over by a policeman. As the cop approached, Leo began rubbing the steering column, explaining to his father, “I’m trying to get some grease on my hands”—to appear as though he were merely a driver, unaware of what was hidden on board. He wet his pants.
“My father saw that his other son didn’t have the stomach for that kind of business,” Harold said. “He was so pure, Leo. But he had to work, with his hands. You think your grandfather had five million dollars in the bank like I had? You think he had a million shares of U.S. Glass?” He held up a paper towel. “He couldn’t steal this.”
The first big sentence came down in 1950: fourteen years, for robbing an appliance store at gunpoint and severely beating its owner. My father, who was eight years old at the time, was told that his Uncle Heshy was out of town and working for the government. Only when he discovered a letter with “Drawer N” in Trenton as the return address did he learn the truth. After that, Leo’s family rode with him to the penitentiary on Sunday afternoons and waited for him in the car as he visited Harold. “He gave his parents such a list of requests—the cooked chickens and Genoa salamis and cheese,” my grandmother says. “Leo had three men at the warehouse working on it for a day or two. Non-kosher salamis—nobody else ate that.”
Released after eight years, Harold sat at Fannie and Mendel’s kitchen table, blustering about the connections he’d made in prison and bragging about his new Cadillac. “We almost never saw him after that,” my father recalls. “My parents were protecting us from him.” Except for one legendarily tempting silver tea set, his gifts were not accepted.
In 1960, he met a little Italian lady with blazing-red hair. Her parents lived on Wright Avenue in Jersey City, in the middle of Harold’s turf. “I seen how she was in the neighborhood—not crying or loud, not with this guy and that, like all the other cunts,” he says. He wooed her for six months with boxes of cookies from Sutter’s, in Greenwich Village. (He noticed the place did a brisk business, so he had it robbed and found a hundred and forty thousand dollars in the vault.)
Harold proposed with a four-carat diamond solitaire. They settled in Lodi, across the George Washington Bridge, four towns deep into New Jersey. It was a big house—five bedrooms and a finished basement—on a small lot. In quick succession, they had two daughters.
Not long after I first saw Harold, I was introduced to his older daughter at my cousin’s wedding in Texas. She had travelled halfway across the country for the night, even though she barely knew the cousin, because, she said, “that’s what family does.” When I told her I was writing about her father, she became hysterical. “Who wants to read about that?” she said. “Nobody who knows me knows about this. You have no right to play God and resurrect it. Do you think anybody will hire you after they find out who your uncle is?”
Almost everyone in my family objected to the idea of my telling Harold’s story. My aunt, who had known Harold only when she was a little girl, hung up on me when I called to ask a question. I stayed at my grandmother’s house when I was doing research in Bayonne and Jersey City, but after a couple of days she said it was making her feel complicit and told me to find a hotel.
Harold built his C.V. in a remarkably short time, and was most active from 1958 to 1963, between incarcerations. He owed his range—bookmaking, resort hotels, hijacking, and trucking—to his having a working relationship with a number of Mafia families. He was a nine-to-fiver many days, as evidenced by F.B.I. surveillance of the office he shared with an accountant at 19 West Forty-fourth Street, near the Algonquin Hotel. In the reports, Harold and various associates discuss real-estate deals in the Philippines and Argentina; his effort to sell a swim club; the distribution of stolen watches, clocks, and a single fur piece; and the purchase of B-25 and B-26 bombers, which, the F.B.I. noted, “could be used against Cuba,” as well as a deal to sell arms to Cuban revolutionaries. Harold works late some nights. He naps on his couch. He returns from the Copacabana.
Moneylending remained his bread and butter. Federal agents who raided his office in Bayonne found a stack of immaculately kept ledgers and, in a kitchen drawer, thirty pairs of handcuffs. In 1961, a wiretap caught him comparing rackets with Angelo DeCarlo, a boss in New Jersey. “Use a little common sense, go and book horses,” DeCarlo suggested. He thought loan-sharking was too slow a business.
“We don’t never sit,” Harold said. “We call three, four, five, six times a day.” He said that for a five-thousand-dollar loan his standard interest—the vigorish—was two hundred and fifty dollars a week; if he lent twenty thousand dollars out for a year, his profit was fifty-two thousand dollars.
DeCarlo was impressed. “Two-fifty a week? We get a hundred dollars a week for five thousand dollars.”
“You’re scabs,” Harold said. “You’ll have to organize you guys.”
Harold told clients he hoped they didn’t pay. He delighted in the extortion process, casting himself as its lone upright party. Violence just meant he was keeping his word: his client, after all, had broken the agreement. “The curse of my business,” he told me, philosophically, “is you got to do business with a lot of scumbag cocksuckers.”
But Harold’s prey were often ordinary people conducting legal transactions—if somewhere along the margins of commerce. In the testimony and wiretapping transcripts that arose from two extortion cases, the despair of his victims is palpable; they had no idea what they were getting into. Joseph Zavod, a real-estate speculator in Philadelphia, was one such client. At a public auction on June 24, 1963, Zavod and three partners had purchased the West Philadelphia Jewish Community Center for ninety thousand dollars. They planned to resell it immediately, through a prearranged deal, to the Cobbs Creek Civic Association for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Unfortunately, they had miscalculated the amount needed for a down payment and discovered themselves thirteen thousand five hundred dollars short.
Joseph Zavod had never been much of a businessman. In a good year, he brought home maybe eight thousand dollars before taxes. He was a happy-go-lucky type, an enthusiast for magic tricks and hypnotism and exotic animals. Zavod opened a pet-supply store and, when that failed, worked as a buyer for a drugstore chain. In 1963, he was diagnosed with polycythemia, a condition that caused his body to overproduce red blood cells. The main symptom was constant fatigue, which forced him to look for a desk job. Real estate seemed like a good idea.
One of the first opportunities that came his way was the J.C.C. deal, and he really needed it to work out. He was thirty-nine, with three children, no disability insurance, and no savings to speak of. He stood to make at least fifteen thousand dollars from the resale. Zavod later testified that, through a tenuous connection of one of his partners, Jimmy Roberts, he contacted Harold, and, late at night, Zavod and Roberts drove to Bayonne.
The windows of Harold’s storefront office on Hudson Boulevard were clouded by grime, and the front room was full of broken furniture. He sat in the back, at a large desk, flanked by two of his “bookkeepers,” there to serve as extra muscle. Zavod detailed his plan to flip the J.C.C. and requested a thirteen-thousand-five-hundred-dollar loan. Harold reached into a drawer and pulled out a fistful of large-denomination bills.
“He stacked them in front of him and they made quite a nice pile,” Zavod testified. “He counted off thirteen thousand five hundred dollars, put a rubber band around it and pushed it out on the desk, and put the rest of it away.” Nervously, Zavod and Roberts agreed to his outrageous terms: twenty-five thousand five hundred dollars for the thirteen thousand five hundred dollars, to be paid on an installment plan over the course of a month.
Zavod asked if they had to fill out any promissory notes or loan papers. “No, just a handshake is enough,” Harold said. He took a long, bone-handled revolver from his desk and pointed it at Zavod. “This I do not like to use in order to collect my money.” Then he picked up a fourteen-inch-long piece of rubber hose that was filled with lead, and whacked Roberts on the knee with it. “That hurt, didn’t it?” Harold said. “I would much rather use this.”
Zavod and his partners missed the deadline; their resale settlement was stalled. Harold granted a couple of extensions, but, according to the testimony, the arrangement quickly dissolved into an exchange of pleas and threats. The culmination was Harold’s unannounced appearance, on August 27th, on Zavod’s doorstep in Broomall, a suburb west of Philadelphia. “My sister let him in,” his son Alan Zavod told me. “She was twelve. I was seventeen that summer. She told him where the bedroom was, and he marched straight upstairs.”
“I went a little crazy with this guy,” Harold told me.
Zavod was laid up with a complication from the blood disorder. Harold rifled through Zavod’s closet and drawers, looking for money. “You can’t even afford to buy your wife any decent jewelry. There is nothing in here but junk.” He said that if Zavod could not deliver thirteen thousand five hundred dollars within another month—and if he wanted to save his own life—his home was his only collateral. Harold would pay Zavod twenty-five thousand dollars for the three-bedroom house. Since Zavod still owed more than nine thousand dollars on the house, Harold explained, that left him with about fifteen hundred dollars to buy a new one.
Zavod looked up. “I would rather not. Do I have any choice?”
Harold drew up a bill of sale. Zavod summoned his wife upstairs to co-sign it.
It was a busy year for Harold. During that summer of 1963, he was out on bail in four separate cases, and was facing a ten-year sentence for possessing a truck full of stolen men’s suits. On September 12th, as Zavod continued to scramble, Harold flew to Denver, where a businessman named Albert Hayutin had hired him. Hayutin wanted Harold to retrieve a hundred and twenty thousand dollars owed him by a stockbroker, Joseph Cannistraci, from a partnership in a land-development and mining company.
“Like an evil genie unwittingly released, the sadistic defendant rapidly assumed the entire direction and control of the conspiracy,” reads an appellate brief from the eventual case against Harold. The first day Harold was in town, according to testimony, Hayutin returned to his office from lunch and found Cannistraci, who weighed some three hundred pounds, stripped to the waist. Harold was sitting beside him holding a revolver.
Hayutin asked, “What’s going on here?”
Harold said that he and Cannistraci had reached “a complete understanding.”
Back in New York, he stormed into a Wall Street brokerage company where Cannistraci was a principal and seized stocks as partial payment. Cannistraci couldn’t come up with the rest, of course, but what really got him in trouble was showing up two days late for an appointment at Harold’s office. As his only defense, he brought his friend Earl Humphreys, a lounge singer and ex-marine who had come to New York to perform on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.”
Harold was furious. He told Cannistraci it was no longer about money but a matter of “respect.” Off came Harold’s wedding band, his watch, and his jacket. He rolled up his sleeves.
“He then told me either I’m going to die as a man or die as a coward,” Cannistraci told a grand jury. (Putting up resistance, Harold explained, was dying like a coward.) “But if I did not die like a man then he would proceed to kill each member of my family, including my son when he reached the age of thirteen, and there was no business discussion at all.” From the adjoining room, Cannistraci said, an unseen person handed Harold a plastic sheath filled with copper wires. Over the course of four hours, he struck Cannistraci fifty or so times on the arms and head, then landed a blow above his ear, opening a cut.
Humphreys, permitted to mop the blood from Cannistraci’s neck with a handkerchief, spoke up. “If he has any more of this coming,” he said, “I would rather take them than watch them.”
This so impressed Harold that he gave Cannistraci a two-day reprieve.
Cannistraci went to the Manhattan District Attorney. Detectives installed a bug near Harold’s desk and tapped Humphreys’s phone. “Kayo called me up after Cannistraci missed his next appointment,” Humphreys told me. “He’d taken a shine to me. I got the feeling he wanted to be friends.”
“You know what bothers me more than anything in the world?” Harold said to Humphreys. “That you were man enough to . . . suffer for him, and this man didn’t even have the audacity, or the integrity, rather, to protect you and . . . at least keep his word, you know, by showing up.” He offered to help Humphreys get singing gigs at a night club.
Harold was arrested for extortion on October 23rd, just as he was planning to head off to the Philippines. (He had learned that he was under investigation.) The same week, extortion charges were also brought against him in Philadelphia; Joseph Zavod had gone to the F.B.I. The day after the New York case was slated for trial, Cannistraci was found murdered on the Long Island Expressway.
Here began the second career of Kayo Konigsberg, eluding the law from behind bars. First, he gave up on appealing the smaller outstanding convictions in New Jersey and began serving three consecutive sentences at the Hudson County Jail, in Jersey City. As a prisoner there, he was immune from a New York State writ of prosecution; no trial against him in New York could start until the D.A.’s office could get him moved. He had good reason to stay, having easily bought off the warden, Henry McFarland. “I ran that place,” Harold said. “I knew everybody in Hudson County. The warden was a sucker.”
Harold’s setup made the prison scene in “GoodFellas” look like prison. He had a private apartment done over for him in the jail library, with his own TV, telephone, radio, refrigerator, hot plate, desk, and sofa. “He had a wine-colored rug and parlor chairs,” a fellow-prisoner, Michael Hardy, recalled. “On Rosh Hashanah he made sure all the Jewish cons got invited to services. He sent the guards out for pizzas.” Any inmate who came to Harold with the right recommendation was looked after. He was allowed unlimited visitors. A grand jury in 1965 was told that one frequent guest was twenty-five-year-old Marilyn Jean Fraser, a former Rose Bowl Queen whom the United States Attorney’s office identified as a heroin addict and fifty-dollar-a-night call girl. At the time, stories circulated that Harold kept a prisoner as a cook and threw dinner parties, and left the jail in the evenings to collect debts. Some afternoons, it was said, he and the warden went to the racetrack together.
In Gay Talese’s “Honor Thy Father,” just after the Mafia heir Bill Bonanno arrives in prison, a guard presents him with candy and magazines and says they are a welcoming gift from Kayo Konigsberg. “Your uncle always impressed me,” Bonanno told me. “No matter where he was, he found a way to manipulate the situation.”
He had a knack for getting under people’s skin, doing favors that left them indebted or ensnared. David M. Satz, a former United States Attorney who prosecuted Harold in New Jersey, recalled, “Anybody that Harold drew into his vortex, they became his property. He overwhelmed people so they were like little lambs.” One lawyer made a lot of money from Harold’s stock tips, and others had the bad judgment to frequent his parties at the Jersey City jail. People came to believe that those who worked as Harold’s lawyers were at risk of being owned by him.
“He made me crazy,” said Frank Lopez, another of Harold’s lawyers. “When he was on trial in Manhattan, he asked me to go to Joe Louis’s hotel and hand him a thousand to sit with his supporters. He thought it would endear him to the three black jurors.” (Louis showed up, but Harold lost anyway.)
Still another lawyer, Ivan Fisher, who represented Harold in one case and a successful appeal but abandoned it before the retrial, said, “He takes too much. He’s very ingratiating. And he’s terrifying physically.” He wanted to know if Harold was still angry with him for quitting. “By the way,” Fisher asked, “how old is he now?”
“Seventy-three.”
“That helps,” he said.
Exasperating demands and intimidation were woven through my own encounters with Harold. Each visit and letter carried requests: for a certain edition of a pocket dictionary or a brand of red felt-tips; for me to take up his parole with people of influence in New York State, or investigate the jurors who found him guilty almost twenty years ago. Without consulting me, he had a lawyer put me on a list of “paralegal assistants.” (I wasn’t the only relative on whom he’d conferred this status.) The arrangement left me uncomfortable, but I met with Harold on his terms because, he’d cautioned, it was our only assurance of privacy.
During one of my visits to Auburn, Harold lost his temper so many times—about my apparent misunderstandings of how he once bought off a cop, and of his methods in brokering a meeting between Joseph P. Kennedy and Vito Genovese—that I gathered my notebooks and stood up to leave.
“What are you doing?” he said softly. “We still got a few minutes.”
“Gai gezunt,” I said, from a farewell he’d taught me: Go in good health.
“Gai gezunterhayt.” Harold was walking away, finishing the saying under his breath. “Sholem aleichem.”
He turned to face me again. “And remember, by the mouth the fish dies.” Though he knew I was writing about him, he occasionally threw out such ominous remarks.
I had been staying at the Auburn Holiday Inn, within walking distance of the prison, but it gave me the creeps, so I found a hotel in Syracuse, forty minutes away. I was in the habit of packing only one day’s worth of clothes, telling myself that Harold was probably not going to see me and I’d get to go home. But why would he turn me away? Who else was going to listen to him? In the evening, I called my parents. They were sitting on their patio in Omaha. My father, usually interested in the details of my work, was always tired when I phoned from Auburn, or very busy sealing a leaky showerhead. That night, I made an extra effort to engage him.
“He’s a fat old man in prison,” my father said, cutting me off. “Why do this to yourself? Isn’t it depressing?”
I was at Auburn the next morning with salamis, rye bread, and jars of mustard. Harold said he didn’t want the food, intending, I’m sure, to let me know I needed him more than he needed me. He sent me instead to the vending machines for two packs of Lunchables. Like my grandfather, he was a big eater who ate daintily. He set the little stacks of crackers, cheese, and watery ham on paper towels and meticulously lined up sixteen sandwiches.
He spoke of his plan to appeal his murder conviction. When he got the verdict reversed, he was going to find the district attorney who had put him away, “and I will choke him with that verdict.” He made a throttling gesture. “I will let him suck wind through his asshole.”
“How can you say that?”
He shrugged. “I’m a very expressionable guy.” He was serene again, adjusting his prison-issued bifocals.
Being the immediate object of his threats could be deeply unsettling. “I’m going to kill you,” he told me during our last meeting, having decided that being written about would hurt his chances at his next parole hearing, in 2002. He leaned in close. “I’m going to chop you up a hundred different ways, and you can put that in your magazine.” My gaze drifted toward the nearest guard, and Harold formed a claw with his thumb and two fingers. “I only need this to kill you. I’ll go right through your eye and rip your brain out of your fucking head in three seconds. You’d be dead before the guards get here.” He chuckled. “I’ll bet you whimper like a baby when I kill you, you little cocksucker.” A few minutes later, he was asking me to get him an orange soda.
On May 29, 1964, with trials for both the Philadelphia and the New York extortion cases looming, a prison guard discovered Harold in a “heavy sleep.” His friend Warden McFarland reported that he had fallen off a chair while changing a light bulb and had hit his head on a bed frame. When he came to, a government physician diagnosed a brain contusion with a possible hemorrhage: “In answer to questions, he mumbles incoherently. . . . He is not capable of standing trial.” Both trials were delayed.
In Manhattan, two sanity hearings were held, occupying nine weeks and generating twenty-four hundred pages of transcripts. Psychiatrists who testified to his incompetence gave conflicting assessments—attributing it, by turns, to a brain trauma, organic paresis, paranoid schizophrenia, and “chronic brain syndrome.” At pretrial motions, he was brought into the courtroom on a stretcher, then positioned in a wheelchair. In a bathrobe, wrapped in blankets and with a towel around his head, he would sag for hours as though catatonic.
Away from court, according to government records, Harold was observed conferring with his lawyer, reading the Times, and playing pinochle with the other inmates. A federal prison-hospital evaluation said, “The patient was able to get several other patients to wait on him and to satisfy many of his needs. . . . He was able to convince the hydrotherapist that he was unable to use his right leg whatsoever even when actually standing and walking on both legs.”
After doctors at Bellevue Hospital finally concluded that he was malingering, he concocted another strategy for evading trial. Although Harold has always denied rumors that he coöperated with the government, federal documents—and subsequent interviews—make clear that he did, persuading the Feds, in return, to try secretly to shield him from justice. These documents are not part of the public record, and my attempts to obtain them under the Freedom of Information Act led nowhere. Eventually, in storage rooms of state and federal prosecutors and in the homes of retired investigators, I found hundreds of foxed pages never introduced in court—surveillance, F.B.I. interviews, and correspondence among Justice Department officials.
On January 11, 1965, John Malone, the F.B.I.’s top man in New York, got word from a prison official that Harold was interested in a visit “alone, as soon as possible.” Malone met with Harold the next day.
According to a coded “airtel” memo from Malone’s office to J. Edgar Hoover, Harold immediately declared that he might be willing to furnish information about La Cosa Nostra that included twenty murders. “When asked why he was doing this,” the memo went on, “he stated that now he is down and out, the hoods that he did so much for are abandoning him and giving him a hard time, and he wants to have the last say.” He also asked that the F.B.I. provide his wife and children with protection and money.
During the sixties, the F.B.I. had a serious public-relations problem. Hoover had long maintained that there was no such thing as organized crime. Now he was being shown up by his archrival, Robert Kennedy, who, as the United States Attorney General from 1961 to 1964, made dismantling the Mafia his highest priority.
Hoover gave the go-ahead to making a deal with Harold, though without promising money. “You should take into consideration that Mrs. Konigsberg is of Italian background and herself comes from a hoodlum-type family,” he wrote Malone, and “they may not desire to be relocated by and receive financial assistance from the Government.” Hoover instructed the New York office to be “most circumspect” in handling the informant, “bearing in mind the possibility of a devious trap being set by him for personal reasons.”
A team of F.B.I. agents began visiting Harold at the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, in May, 1965. “He would give you part of a story, because he said you already knew the rest,” says John Connors, an agent who had tracked Harold since the early sixties. “He goaded you into asking questions he wasn’t going to answer. But he got carried away. He liked listening to himself talk.” In the first weeks, Harold outlined the power structures of Mafia families, who owned which rackets, which gangsters ate their daily marinara where. But when agents came to see him on May 25th he was bored with providing mere intelligence.
“This is nothing,” he told them. “Why be interested in nickels and dimes?” Soon, he was cataloguing his own Mob hits.
To bolster his credibility, he sent the F.B.I. to a Mob graveyard in Jackson Township, New Jersey, where agents exhumed the remains of two bodies they believed to be his victims. One, a suspected informant, had been buried under a cement porch, and the other, a theatrical agent who owed money, had been stuffed into a metal drum in a chicken shed and, Harold said, doused with acid. They also found hair and bone fragments thought to belong to a woman whose husband was involved in the making of pornographic films.
In the table of contents to Harold’s confessions, the F.B.I. lists twenty murders, deaths, and disappearances.
What the government wanted most was to pin Anthony Castellito’s death on Tony Pro, a bigger catch than Harold. Robert Kennedy, in “The Enemy Within,” his book about investigating unions for the Senate’s McClellan committee, described the Teamsters as “a conspiracy of evil” and “the most powerful institution in this country—aside from the United States Government itself.” Over the previous two years, another union challenger of Tony Pro’s had been murdered, and Jimmy Hoffa and seven others were indicted for defrauding the Central States Pension Fund of more than twenty million dollars.
Harold told the F.B.I. about Castellito’s murder. But before he would agree to testify he demanded the government drop the extortion cases against him in Philadelphia and New York. William Hundley, who ran the organized-crime unit at the Justice Department, was amenable, even recommending that Harold, as long as he helped them locate Castellito’s body, be granted immunity from prosecution for any crimes he admitted to. As to the pending New York prosecution, Hundley assured his superiors, in a memo, “I know I can handle that one informally.” Much to the Manhattan D.A.’s consternation, the Feds installed Harold at the Medical Center for Prisoners, in Springfield, Missouri, protracting his hoax with another year of psychiatric exams. And they quietly dropped the case against him in Philadelphia.
When the time was right, Harold was put on a train to Newark, then transported to the Somerset County jail, where not even the warden knew his identity. On June 30, 1966, he led marshals to the scene of Castellito’s burial, on farmland east of Freehold Township. “We looked for two days,” says Arnold M. Stone, the Justice Department lawyer who led the search effort. “We didn’t find Castellito. Harold kept saying, ‘It’s gonna take a while.’” Harold had received a letter from his wife saying she’d heard the body had been moved. It was hoped that laboratory tests could find traces of the corpse or of its disinterment, but although Harold recognized the terrain, he could not pinpoint the exact spot.
Without a body, the Feds were unable to keep Harold out of court, and in December, 1966, he was returned to lower Manhattan and tried in one of the extortion cases. Here, he attempted to goad the judge into a mistrial. He announced that his lawyer Frances Kahn was a “spy” for the D.A., and fired her. He kept Kahn and Frank Lopez on as “paralegal assistants” for his pro se defense. They fed him notes from their seats at the defense table. “I had my wife sit alongside of me and look up words in a dictionary,” Harold told me.
“People lined up outside 100 Centre Street to see the show he put on,” Leonard Newman, one of the prosecutors, says. Harold wore the same mismatched suit every day and what the Times called a “King of Clubs beard.” He bullied witnesses and, when overruled, accused the judge, Abraham Gellinoff, of trying to hide exculpatory information.
The people were represented by Frank Rogers, a politically ambitious assistant D.A. arguing his first case. Rogers, who had been a member of the law review at St. John’s, was a skinny guy beginning to put on middle-age weight. He wore three-piece suits and smoked a pipe. Harold homed in on him, denouncing him as a “bigot, sadist, low-life, reptilest, fork-tongue talker.” He even brought Rogers to the witness stand four times. “Every time he runs out of witnesses, he calls me,” Rogers complained.
Cross-examining a psychiatrist who had been brought in to establish his sanity, Harold took an hour setting up a hypothetical situation. “Now, Doctor, assuming everything I’ve said to be true,” he said, finally getting to his question, “do you have an opinion as to whether District Attorney Rogers is crazy?”
Those who wanted to like Harold were at a loss. In the Post, Murray Kempton filed a sorrowful dispatch: “One went . . . preparing to salute one of the giants of the American struggle for Constitutional liberty. . . . One fled after the second hour with an idol crumbling in the dust behind.”
Deep into the trial, when Harold’s ramblings strayed further than usual, Gellinoff cut him off. “Mr. Konigsberg, listen, my friend, now I’m—”
“ ‘My friend’? You got ten dollars, I’ll sell you back your friendship,” Harold said.
Gellinoff finally broke the following day. “Shut up when I’m talking,” he said after excusing the jurors. “You are the greatest faker in the history of the court that I know of. . . . You are one of the most brilliant people that I have ever seen as a defendant in this court. . . . I have said these things on the record so that you will know, Mr. Konigsberg—”
“That you’re prejudiced?”
“—you will not get away with this.”
The jury found Harold guilty on four counts of extortion and one of conspiracy, but they remained undecided on four other counts and acquitted him of one. On the day of sentencing, he refused to admit that he was the same Harold Konigsberg who had been convicted of two prior felonies, and Gellinoff had no choice but to empanel a new jury and try a case simply to establish Harold’s identity. Another five weeks in court, and Gellinoff gave him a stiff sentence of between thirty and forty-four years but remarked, “You’re developing into quite a constitutional lawyer.”
Even with this conviction, Harold was getting away with murder. Peter Richards, a Justice Department prosecutor, pleaded to his superiors, in a memo dated October 31, 1967, “It seems to me impossible to allow this man, who has confessed to more than twenty murders and who has told us that he will ‘go gunning’ for his enemies when he is released from prison, ever to be released from custody.” Afraid that Gellinoff’s sentence was going to be reversed, the Feds tried to use his admission of the Castellito murder against him, going so far as to prepare an indictment—only to drop the indictment soon afterward. With neither a body nor an eyewitness, there was not enough evidence to prosecute him for murder. The F.B.I.’s interviews with Harold had yielded nothing but humiliation.
Although he had hopes of self-preservation and revenge—preferential treatment and Tony Pro’s comeuppance—Harold spoke to the F.B.I. for sport. He liked nothing more than to manipulate authorities and put them through contortions. “Now, there’s a lot of things I’m guilty of,” he told me once. “I’m just saying, catch me on something.”
When I reached Paul Durkin, the primary F.B.I. agent assigned to Harold throughout this period, he said, “I don’t want to get into discussing our relationship.” Why not? “It’s because I liked him.”
Not long after the extortion trial, Rogers, the D.A., and one of his detectives, Joseph Coffey, brought Harold in for questioning. They did not know the extent of what he’d already told the F.B.I. “We wanted information on other people, so Rogers made the mortal fuckup of giving him immunity,” Coffey told me.
“They had no idea Harold was going to implicate himself,” Frank Lopez, who was also in the room, said.
At the time, Coffey was investigating the homicide of Johnny Earle, a waterfront racketeer who had been shot nine years earlier in front of a lunchtime crowd at the Fifty-seventh Street Cafeteria, near Eighth Avenue. “It was the first thing every cop asked,” Coffey told me. “I said, ‘Who killed Johnny Earle?’ ”
“Yeah, I did that,” Harold replied. He proceeded with details, even pointing them toward corroborating evidence (a parking ticket he’d got when he was inside the diner). Then, Coffey said, he admitted to five more killings. “But he didn’t give us a thing we could use. Rogers was devastated.” According to the records of another detective in the room, the tape made of Harold’s confession was lost. Coffey said the Earle case was closed as solved without arrest, and went on, “He was an unusual guy, your uncle. He didn’t care about doing the forty-four years as long as he got over. In his own mind, he showed he was smarter than everybody else. Because he made a wreck out of a top judge like Gellinoff. And he sucked Rogers in, like unbelievable.”
Big Sal Sinno, the accomplice of Harold’s who vanished shortly after they murdered Castellito, in 1961, was forgotten but not gone. Later that year, fearing that Tony Pro planned to kill him, he had fled to Milwaukee. He worked for the railroad, under aliases, but at some point things started to go bad and his girlfriend, the mother of his two sons, turned to prostitution. Naturally, Big Sal later said, this was hard on the family. There were fights.
One day in 1975, after Big Sal hit her, she tried to get even. She phoned long-distance to the Hoboken police and told them that a “Charles Caputo,” living in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, was actually Big Sal Sinno, who, officers recorded with puzzlement, “is wanted in Hoboken, N.J., for some serious crime.” When Big Sal saw his phone bill and pieced together what his girlfriend had done, he hurriedly decamped with his kids and tried to make amends with Tony Pro, asking for money to relocate once again. He was given twenty-five hundred dollars and was promised another twenty-five hundred if he claimed it in person, but he figured he was being set up.
That’s when Big Sal called the F.B.I. and begged for a spot in the witness-protection program. Special Agent John Markey asked what Big Sal could give them in return. He gave them the Castellito story.
In the summer of 1978, Kayo Konigsberg was finally tried for murder, along with Tony Pro. (The other principals were by now dead or missing.) For technical reasons, the case was brought by Michael Kavanagh, the District Attorney of Ulster County, New York, where the crime had taken place. “We were in over our heads,” recalled Kavanagh, who was thirty-four years old and new to the job. “It was one of your bigger Mafia trials to date, in Kingston, our little Colonial county seat of twenty thousand. You’ve got guys right out of ‘The Godfather’ pulling up in limousines. You’ve got sharpshooters on top of the jewelry store across the street.”
Harold’s lawyer, Ivan Fisher, took the case for just twenty-five hundred dollars in expenses, but still Harold managed to obtain what they needed. “During our lunch breaks, he ordered in four-pound buckets of shrimp, with fresh tartar sauce and Russian dressing,” Fisher told me. While they ate, Harold worked the phones and discovered that the New York Secretary of State had a file on a real-estate agent in Kerhonkson, who was going to testify to seeing him on Castellito’s property the day of the murder. As it happened, the state had suspended the man’s real-estate license for writing bad checks—the kind of misdeed that can be used to undermine a witness’s credibility. Though Fisher tried to cross-examine him on these grounds, the D.A. objected and was sustained. A guilty verdict came in for both defendants, but Harold appealed and got his conviction overturned, forcing a retrial.
“The judge’s preclusion to that cross ultimately caused the reversal,” Fisher said. “Our case was built on Harold’s investigation. I have no idea how he got the file. The prosecution didn’t even have a copy.”
Before and after the initial trial—between 1976 and 1979—Harold was housed in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in lower Manhattan. He had the place rigged for reconnaissance. “Nine P.M., I would go into the counsellor’s office and lock the door from inside,” he told me.
“How did you get the keys?”
“Why do you ask stupid questions?”
Harold said he phoned around to prisons across the country, “and I asked for the Bureau of Identification. I’d say I was the counsellor from the M.C.C., they’d call me back at the M.C.C. office, they’d give me everything I wanted to know. I found where the informants were. I found out Big Sal was being hid in Kansas City.”
“Did anybody go after him?”
“Well, the decision was that we do nothing. And on my own there was not much I could do in the M.C.C., was there?”
Maybe Harold outsmarted himself. He represented himself in the retrial and was found guilty, this time for good. Tony Pro died as a prisoner in Lompoc, in 1988. Big Sal Sinno entered witness protection, but in 1988 he was arrested on a corner in the East Village, minutes after shooting an acquaintance. A detective quoted in the Times described the killing as “very professionally done.”
Although Harold’s daughters were infants the last time he was out of prison, they are quick to say he raised them. One is a lawyer and the other a corporate executive. One has described him as “my best friend, a wonderful father.” Both speak to him on the telephone every week, and have done so for most of their lives. He provided for his wife and children, with a house and some money. The Cleveland gambler Moe Dalitz, he says, furnished them with five thousand dollars a month. After Dalitz died, in 1989, Harold’s wife went to Boca Raton to see Gerry Catena, an aging gangster. He gave her ten thousand dollars, but he asked that she not come to him again.
America has a short and pliant memory. But Longy Zwillman’s family members felt it necessary to change their name, according to a friend of theirs. The daughter of a major bookmaker who was an associate of Harold’s and Zwillman’s told me that she never discussed her father’s work, even with her family. She insisted, though, that it wasn’t a source of shame. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but, I mean, I don’t think my father ever killed anybody.”
Last winter, Joseph Zavod’s son drove me to his family’s former home in Broomall, where he remembered Harold trying to throw his family out on the street with fifteen hundred dollars to their name. Alan Zavod is thickly built and has a salt-and-pepper goatee; he is married and works for a car dealership. He wore a leather bomber jacket with rawhide lacing up the front. The house, which has changed owners at least twice, sits on a cul-de-sac. It is part of a subdivision called Marple Heights, some hundred and fifty split-levels that went up in 1955.
Joseph Zavod had not, in fact, escaped Harold altogether unharmed. According to federal prosecutors, before Zavod went to the F.B.I., Angelo Bruno, the reigning Mafia don of Philadelphia, learned of the loan and, disapproving of a North Jersey gangster shylocking on his territory, temporarily forbade Harold from returning to collect. Only after Bruno’s protection from Harold wore out did Zavod call the authorities. Zavod still struggled to find work after that, and Alan dropped out of Temple University in his freshman year to support the family with a succession of jobs in sales. Whether it was a favor for not assisting the government’s crackdown on the Bruno family or because, as Alan put it, “nobody else wanted to hire my dad when he was in the papers for doing business with a loan shark,” Joseph Zavod’s next employer was a mortgage-placement company owned by one of Bruno’s captains. I.R.S. audits, two indictments, and one conviction ensued. Zavod died of heart failure, in 1985. During the last decade of his life, he operated a pizza shop with his wife and three children.
“It wasn’t so bad, all of us working together,” Alan said. “We didn’t need anyone else.”
We took the West Chester Pike—a mid-century drag of automotive shops, pizzerias, and funeral homes—to the former West Philadelphia J.C.C. Now it is the Philadelphia Baptist Church, but the original carvings in the arched doorways remain: a Magen David, a menorah, Torah scrolls.
“For a long time after everything happened, my father and I would drive past this place,” Alan said. An elevated train roared by. “Just like we’re doing. And then we’d discreetly flip it the bird, both of us.”
Anthony Castellito, Jr.—who was a truck driver, like his father—stayed in Tony Pro’s Local 560 for thirteen years after his father was murdered. Anthony, Jr., felt stuck there, but it was a respectable job. “It fit my personality: you was a man,” he said. “I wasn’t going to be a clerk—what, some asshole?” It was “spite work,” knowing that the person who was responsible for his father’s disappearance was going to be writing him pension checks for the rest of his life. Later, he found employment in heavy construction, and in 1989 he retired to Florida, where my letter reached him.
“You probably don’t know the kind of guy my father was,” he said. “My father was a tough guy. If Kayo was so tough, why’d he have a bunch of other guys helping him?
“I can’t believe at this time in my life that I would be talking to a Konigsberg. When I saw your name on the envelope, I thought it was Kayo. I thought, What, is he saying ‘I’m sorry’? There’s been a lot of heartaches because of him. My kid sister, God, if I say anything about what happened to our father, she loses it. She’s got a swimming pool, a beautiful family, they have a lot of parties. Sometimes I tell her, ‘I know somebody up there who’d be very proud of you right now.’
“By the way, if you talk to your uncle, could you please ask him where my father is? I mean, the body? My mother passed away last year, multiple heart attacks. It’s a shame to die not knowing where your husband is. My sisters and I told her, ‘Ma, he never even knew what happened, it was so fast.’ I can’t tell her he fought for his life, that he died in his kitchen.”
“My dear nephew, I been betrayed by everybody,” Harold said. He shuffled into the visitors’ room at Auburn, combing back the wings of his hair. It was late one afternoon, and I had asked if he ever thought about how he ended up the way he did. I imagined he hadn’t heard me, because he got up and announced that he was taking a piss. Then, sitting back down at our table, he said, “Let me ask you, does your father work hard? Did your grandfather work hard? So I don’t know where I came from.”
For a moment, I thought he was acknowledging the shame he had brought his family, and I put my hand on his. He recoiled and groaned. “Aw, you’re like a salesman now,” he said. “What could I tell you about the family? I separated myself a hundred different ways. What are you expecting to understand?” ♦
