Born to Lose (54 page)

Editorials asked if there was a better argument for restoration of the death penalty than the senseless bludgeoning of Captain Peterson. After all, noted the journalists, current law ensured that the assailants would face nothing worse than added confinement—a joke to lifers—“all which is an open invitation for violence-prone convicts pathologically beyond rehabilitation.” From the courthouse steps, District Attorney Duggan told reporters that the restoration of capital punishment would be “given warm applause by Pennsylvania residents and law enforcement officers.”

Led by Officer Ron Horvat, the prison's union met with Governor Shapp, who, in an about-face, acceded to a reopening of the Home Block's
basement “for greater control of bad actors and better protection for officers.” Over his political career Shapp would never ungrip his opposition to the death penalty and seemed always willing to downplay criminal responsibility by citing “prison overcrowding” or “the violence of our time.” Nevertheless, Shapp did come to favor a single-purpose prison to house the worst offenders, the sanguinary, the predatorily wicked. (Only hazily defined at the time, this concept was the forerunner of the supermax prison.) “We've been working on this for over a year,” Shapp stated in a show of concern. This was a surprise to Horvat and others in corrections.

One headline referring to the killers, “Officials Mum on Report Cons Were Worked Over,” forced an initial tap dance by the corrections commissioner, Steward Werner. “We're not sure of the cause of the injuries,” he hedged, a response that provoked still more skepticism, more questions. Employing a notable Watergate phrase, Gus Mastros said to a colleague, “Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in.”

Indeed, Butler was marked up, Delker's head was bruised, and Hoss's right eye was blackened, while McGrogan nursed a busted rib and punctured lung. Reluctantly or not, internal affairs got involved and a few attorneys sniffed about. Rumors that charges would be brought, worried the officers suspected—until CO Steve Dutkowski adjusted the attitude. Hand still bruised from throwing punches, the veteran officer declared, “Screw these people and any other pansy-assed liberal. They weren't there, to see your friend butchered like that. If they wouldn't have done the same, shame on them. They want to throw me in the clink? I'll go … be honored to.” On top of Dutkowski's defiance, Bus Reilly, for whom everyone felt sympathy, weighed in: “Yeah, they were beat up … but not enough. They're still alive, aren't they?”

“Correctly,” said Gus Mastros, “any charges died away.”

Amid all the finger-pointing, influential members of the black community made the most distressing allegation of all: conspiracy—that is, prison complicity. Sala Udin of the Congress of African People, local NAACP head Tim Stevens, and state legislator K. Leroy Irvis jointly announced the formation of a task force. Said Irvis, “We are concerned about a prison atmosphere—conditions—that encouraged the murder of a black man, a captain of the guard.” The “conditions” were nowhere near a secret, but Irvis's next statement implied a cover-up: “There've been other mysterious killings of black men at Western Pen, such as the stabbing of black inmate Melvin Sermons.”

This stabbing was not a mystery to anyone at the pen. Said Kozak, “Sermons whopped Delker, disrespected him in front of his friends. Sermons didn't know who he was dealing with. Delker killed Sermons. This is just like when the white Charlie Gans ran his mouth to the black Clifford Futch, disrespected him in front of others. Gans didn't know who he was dealing with. Next day, Futch kills Gans. Normal society sees this as craziness, but it's what you get with impulsive, low-esteem guys whose first option to a slight is to murder someone.”

The task force further questioned if prison administrators would “share the guilt. This is not an open-and-shut case. We hope there is no conspiracy.”

“To hear these things,” said Mastros, “cut deep.”

As for Stanley's considerations of blame,

Dear Diane,

I want you to know that nigger at Western fell on a bar of soap and killed himself so they should have charged Lifebouy soap with murder instead of me. Ha Ha.

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas. I was going to send the kids something but this bullshit came along. Diane, you surely don't believe I do the things I do just to hurt you and the kids. I do what I do because people keep f _ _ _ _ _ _ with me. They won't leave me alone so the only thing I can tell them is I hope their [
sic
] ready to pay the total price. I am. Changing the kids' name was only a waste of time. You know I'm never going to change my ways so you have to know the Hoss name will never be forgotten. I know what the TV, radio and papers did to cover the story. I'm sorry the kids have to suffer. I can't help it they try to make me out as Public Enemy Number One. I try to be cool but they keep putting my name in the news. They transferred me even further away now to Huntingdon. You heard they want to send a death penalty bill to the governor to sign? I'm thinking of something slick to say, you know, for my last words.

I've grown a beard. It's called a Jesus beard. Once a week a guard trims it up real nice. I can't tell you how I look because I'm not allowed to have a mirror. I don't know the last time I saw myself.

I guess I'll go to trial on the nigger case in the spring. Will you come? I send my love to you and the kids.

Stan

. . .

“Day after Peterson's murder I talked to McGrogan in the infirmary,” remembered Edward Fagan. “He told an interesting story, exculpatory or self-serving I was never sure. His history painted him as despicable, but you take your witnesses as you find them. McGrogan was scared, of two minds about whose team to be on. ‘Bob,' I said, ‘Show me your friends and I'll show you your future.' Serving a long stretch, his future was bleak, but he must have figured, better than the ‘actual killers',' as he put it. Eventually, he'd turn state's evidence—save his ass.”

Working with his boss, Bob Duggan, Fagan spent the next several months building the prosecution's case. Then, come March, “Bam!” said Fagan, “everything changed.”

A body found in the woods, dead. It was District Attorney Bob Duggan.

“There was always a little talk about Duggan, his lifestyle and all,” said Fagan “but what came out shocked everyone.”

An heiress to the Mellon fortune, Cordelia Scaife was worth $800 million, hefty portions of which she donated to good causes, usually anonymously. After her first marriage lasted less than a year, her family banished Cordelia to Palm Beach, Florida, for several years, seeking to avoid embarrassment from the divorce. When she finally returned to Pittsburgh, Cordelia renewed her acquaintance with Bob Duggan, a friend since childhood. Although her family accepted the friendship, they discouraged any closer relationship, given Duggan's Catholicism and lower social status.

“Now here's where it gets interesting,” said Fagan.

By this time, Duggan's in his third term as DA and, it comes out, the target of a grand jury investigation. Ties to organized crime, slush funds. Tax evasion, too.

Cordelia and Duggan were, say, an item, and all the while, despite the allegations, she stuck by Duggan. Guess this didn't sit well with the Mellons or Scaifes, but a few days after Cordelia was notified by the irs that she'd be called to answer questions about Duggan, the two flew to Vegas, got married. It was calculated, so speculation went, because by law a wife cannot be compelled to testify against a husband.

Richard Thornburgh, thick in the first Hoss murder case, was still U.S. attorney for western Pennsylvania. Along with the IRS, he tracked Duggan's sources of income to see if he was hiding ill-gotten gains inside his wife's fortune.

“Never [being] invited for tea at those Ligonier estates, we weren't privy
to all,” said Fagan, “but we understood Cordelia's brother, Richard Mellon Scaife, publicly rallied around Duggan, even lobbied the Nixon administration to call Thornburgh off.” At the same time though, Scaife privately cooled toward his new brother-in-law. When a named gangster finally agreed to testify that payoffs had been made to Duggan, Scaife's waning support for Duggan finally ran out.

“It was March 4, I remember, and I was about to head home,” said Fagan.

A few of us were in the office … Duggan, Danny Dunn of the FBI, Mike Fisher … and Dunn's poking fun because I had a bone spur and walked with a hitch—“like Chester on
Gunsmoke,”
he said.

An indictment was due to be presented any day against Duggan. If that happened, there would be a trial, and who knows what juicy tidbits would come out? None of this was brought up, of course. Fisher's talking about a meeting he has with Duggan in the morning and, really, the atmosphere that night was relaxed—you know, “See you tomorrow.” Next morning we got the news.

The police investigation concluded either that Duggan, out hunting on his estate, had tripped, causing the rifle to discharge, or that he'd committed suicide. These explanations raised more than one eyebrow. The rifle was found eight feet from the body and, said one cop, “with that long barrel, you don't shoot yourself in the chest with your boots on. Only a big toe can pull that trigger.”

“But it went in the books as accident or suicide,” said Fagan. “Duggan's wife insisted it was murder. Maybe a mob hit to keep him quiet. Maybe arranged, some said, by the well-fixed to keep dirty laundry in the hamper. For me, I've never believed accident or suicide, never have, never will.” Whatever it was, the incident rocked Pittsburgh's political and social world.

Duggan's demise brought a lesser, but still humiliating, demise for Ed Fagan. A board of judges had appointed Jack Hickton to succeed Duggan as the new district attorney. “By now in my career, I'm second assistant DA,” said Fagan, “but the day Hickton took office, he said, ‘You, get out of that office, and give me the Hoss file.' I had to pack up and go back with the herd of assistant DAs. I was demoted on the spot, pay scale and everything. But that's the political game.” Fagan, knight of the first Hoss trial, was out.

The next day, Hickton, with a flair for the dramatic, called a press conference to inform them that he personally would prosecute the “tragic case of Captain Peterson.” Given Hickton's heavy responsibilities as a big-city
district attorney, this was nearly unheard of, but insiders felt that Hickton, fearing his appointment would last only until the next election, wanted on the boards, to make a name for himself, and at the time there was no better resume-builder than to humble Stanley Hoss.

Working in the Public Defenders Office, Gary Zimmerman was picked to represent Hoss in the Peterson trial. If he'd ever seen a hopeless case to defend, he thought, this was it: eyewitnesses right in the room, the victim's blood drenching his client …

Yet at his first meeting with Hoss, Zimmerman never got the chance to recommend that Hoss beg the court for mercy. “I barely pulled up a chair,” remembered Zimmerman, “when Hoss said, ‘I'm pleading not guilty.' Hoss then asked, ‘Are you up for a good fight?' I said, ‘Yeah, I'm up for that.'” After an hour's talk, Hoss came to believe that Zimmerman would try hard to help him. “After that,” said the young public defender, “we got along well.”

Hoss was entitled to a separate trial, “and that's what he wanted,” said Zimmerman. “We, the defense, thought we could be more successful on our own anyway, so that's the path we took.” The prosecution was quite happy to try Hoss separately. Further, Hoss was to be tried first. That's what DA Hickton wanted.

Of many important details in the process, the prosecution addressed one early and thoroughly. Remembering Maryland's fiasco with the Peugeot case, it was made abundantly certain Hoss would be tried within 180 days.

This is not to say that Zimmerman didn't try for a delay. The trial was scheduled for the first week of June, but Zimmerman threw everything he could at the court. “All the usual stuff,” said Hoss's defender. “You see, a trial starts in the womb, has its own infancy, puberty, adulthood and so forth. In pre-womb, I'm already thinking at the appellate level. I tried to get Stanley sent off to Farview, a place for the criminally insane, for a sixty-day eval, but Loran Lewis, the judge sitting the case, wasn't buying it. Then I wanted a change of venue. This was denied. I appealed, and we had a big hearing on this one, and wow, the fireworks!”

In harness with Zimmerman, the other defense attorneys, John Dean for Delker and Gary Gentile for Butler, likewise wanted a change of venue. “We're all in this one room, attorneys, defendants, everyone,” said Zimmerman. “We were simply saying that our clients could not possibly get a fair trial in Allegheny County. DA Hickton of course disagreed, so I really pissed him off by calling him as a defense witness. I reminded the court it was Mr. Hickton—right after the lamentable death of his predecessor— who trumpeted his intent to personally try Hoss. This, I implied, showed
he lacked objectivity, was out for blood. This wasn't the case, really, but I nonetheless forced him to admit he made the statement.”

If nothing else, Zimmerman was zealous. Hoss joked he sure was getting the taxpayer's money's worth. Hammering on the venue issue, Zimmerman called a dozen news directors from radio and TV stations to speak of the publicity. Typical coverage characterized Hoss as a convicted “cop killer” who was also “implicated in the kidnap and apparent murder of a Maryland woman and her child.” Ian MacLennan, who'd recently retired from the FBI, called a talk show as a private citizen, saying the death penalty should be restored for men like Hoss, “who are animals.” A tape was played of Mike Levine, a popular radio host on KDKA, saying, “I used to think everybody had some redeeming feature. I'm changing my mind about Stanley Hoss.” Noting that KDKA's powerful radio signal reached at least halfway across the United States, Zimmerman concluded sadly that it had a listening audience of “untold millions”—as if Levine had singlehandedly tainted prospective jurors practically nationwide.