Born to Lose (8 page)

“Provocative? Wearing clothes like everyone else at school or everyone my age? I am not going to dress like some old frump. I have heard of elderly women being raped, maybe wearing old flannel coats or babushkas. Were they provocative? I don't think a rapist needs provoked!”

“Of course you're right, but the point is, we don't want to mislead.”

“I'm not misleading anyone! I noticed Stanley Hoss wearing a coat and tie. He was shaved and his hair was trimmed nice. If you're worried about misleading, why don't you talk to him?”

Kathy held her ground and the matter was dropped. Once led into the courtroom, Kathy was greatly bothered that she and Hoss were seated at the same table, across from each other. He attempted to intimidate every chance he got. Hoss did not take the stand, but Kathy, particularly when testifying, could feel Hoss's eyes boring into her. All she could do was keep her eyes on Judge Eppinger, attorney Lapansky, or the back wall of the room … anywhere to avoid meeting Hoss's gaze. Kathy was armed with the truth, yes, but she knew she was not strong enough to stare him down. He was a beast who dashed her nerves.

Some of the evidence produced Kathy had not seen since the rape. Her purse, jacket, and clothing were all tagged and lying on a side table. The culottes she'd sewn that night were scraped and soiled.

Several officers testified. According to Officer Curti, who typed the police report:

“McKenna states he saw Stanley along with another man and this girl walking through East Deer township towards Tarentum about 12:30 A.M. on 4/5/69. He states the girl was arm-in-arm with the men and he observed them about five times. This should have been after the girl states she was raped.”

Officer Kenneth McKenna's statement did not sound good for Kathy and went some distance toward buttressing Hoss's version that the victim went
along with him willingly. However, Lapansky did a good job on redirect, having Kathy explain how she was actually gripped tightly to keep her close to Hoss's side and tell of the fearful threat of being shot right on the street should she struggle. Also, although the two elderly men inside Orris's gas station the night of the rape described what they perceived as an easy interaction among Hoss, Zurka, and the young woman, they admitted they could certainly be mistaken “if one of those boys had a gun in his pocket.”

All the evidence and testimony was in, and Kathy worried that if Hoss was found not guilty, she'd be thought of as a treacherous liar, a conniving teen whore. How could she even go home again?

Then, at 5:05 P.M., Judge Eppinger ruled. “I find you, Stanley B. Hoss Jr. guilty of rape in the first degree. You are to be returned to the Allegheny County Jail where you shall remain pending sentencing by the court.”

Throwing her arms around Lapansky's neck, Kathy thanked him, then broke into tears, her face buried in his shirt and necktie. When she looked up, the judge's chair was empty and people were filing out while others stood in their places. By the door she saw Officer Red Orris wave at her, but he disappeared into the hallway before she could form a smile. Hands cuffed in front and flanked by two men in uniform, Hoss was led toward a side exit. Fighting against an officer's grip and turning his head far around, he strained to keep Kathy in view. Although Kathy, still holding Lapansky's sleeve, quickly turned away, she heard a female voice from Hoss's crowd call her a tramp. Kathy wished her family was with her.

Long before the trial, Hoss had known that if he was convicted he would be sent up for a long time. A rape conviction could bring ten to twenty years—maybe less if the guilty one had no criminal record and was of otherwise pristine background, but Stanley Hoss could boast no such credentials. Still, he swore to himself, no matter what, no matter how, he damn well was not going to rot away in some lousy prison.

“I knew Hoss very well,” Warden William Robinson reflected.

I spent some thirty years in the prison system, so you get to know these guys. Some I got when they were eighteen and, with them in and out and back, still had them when I retired … Life on the installment plan. I first met Hoss at the county workhouse where he was doing a short stint. Hoss was a strong person, exceptionally strong, and a fairly good-looking man.

In that strange way sometimes found between enemies, Hoss appreciated me and I understood him. Odd, but in all my dealings with Hoss, I found him to be normal, even affable, but that's when he chose to be. Yet in the summer of '69, future tidings unknown, Hoss was just one more prisoner in my jail, which was already filled to the brim.

Robinson did indeed have a lot on his plate in 1969. Over the preceding couple of years there'd been much turmoil at the jail. The well-publicized beating of inmate “Georgia” Buoy was a public relations nightmare. After speaking only with inmates, handsome, fair-haired DA Robert Duggan “confirmed” that beatings had been administered for some time, particularly at night. His premature statement pitted his office against the jail's administration and officer corps. A headline shouted, “Jail Terrorism Probe Entered by State Bureau.” Not long after that, Grant Price—who'd become warden in the days of Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelley, and Dillinger—abruptly quit. In a bittersweet parting, Price said, “The duties are becoming greater, more complex … perhaps a younger man can cope better.” Suffering regular salvos from the media, it got worse for the jail when twenty-seven-year-old Richard Mayberry and three sidekicks, armed with zip guns, forced an officer to unlock a door to the outside. For this fiasco, more media potshots were fired at the Ross Street lockup, now dubbed “the schlockup.” After several investigations, the jail's staff was cleared of wrongdoing in the “Georgia” Buoy incident. Although some critics screamed “Whitewash,” most people accepted the conclusions of the
investigating committee, for, as one man in the street concluded in an interview, “You can't have those convicts spittin' in your eye, can you?”

Over the fourteen months following Warden Price's departure, a couple interim wardens ran the place until a permanent replacement—energetic, thirty-seven-year-old William Robinson—came on board. Called Robby by most everyone, Robinson didn't fit ordinary perceptions of a warden. The powers that be brought him to the county jail from the Allegheny County Workhouse, where he'd come up through the ranks to eventually become deputy warden. The county jail, with all its problems, needed a strong, experienced hand, and this, in Robby, is what it got. Young by traditional standards to assume command of such a ticklish post, Robinson was savvy, politically astute, and, most importantly, knew a con when he saw one, literally and figuratively.

However, by the time Robinson officially took up residence (for in those days the warden and his family lived in quarters on the second floor), the jail presented even more problems than usual. While day-to-day grousing by inmates—and often staff—was standard, it still had to be addressed if valid. The jail itself, though beautiful on the outside, often proved to be a maintenance nightmare for those within. This was partly because of its age—it was built in 1886—but its physical deterioration had been aggravated by an explosion in its population over the preceding couple of years to a total of several hundred over capacity. Crowding and insufficient supplies—there weren't even enough towels or sheets—shortened tempers and aggravated racial discord. Disturbances were frequent.

“All my days were busy,” Robinson later recalled,

but sometimes at night I'd walk around and talk to this prisoner or that. I always found the later the hour, the more relaxed the conversation. By reviewing rosters, I knew Hoss had been in the jail since April. I assumed it was for more car thefts or maybe a fight. It wasn't for a few weeks after his arrival that I saw him in passing. I called him “Stasiu,” his nickname in Polish for Stanislaw, and asked how he was getting on. Alluding to the crowded conditions, Hoss gave me a smile and said, “You got quite a mess on your hands. Don't worry about me, I'm fine. Take care of all these other whiners and crybabies.” That's the Hoss I knew then. Sort of a stand-up guy, making do on his own and never making ridiculous requests like you got all the time from the majority of inmates.

It must have been another week or two before I had occasion to talk with Hoss, late one night, in his cell. It was July 20. I remember this because Neil
Armstrong landed on the moon. Everyone was transfixed by this moment in history. We all watched TV and saw people the world over going nuts, kissing, hugging, popping champagne bottles and joking Armstrong would come back to report the moon really was made of green cheese. Hoss said to me, “Well, if you bastards ever build a prison on the moon, I volunteer to go.” I said I'd sign him up first thing in the morning, and we both laughed.

Hoss was in a cell by himself. How he wasn't doubled-up at least, I don't know, for we truly were always scrambling for cell space, but I know as a general rule we wouldn't cell together whites and negroes, or blacks as they then wanted to be called. Anyhow, I was surprised to learn that Hoss was convicted of rape and could get some serious time.

Hoss sat on his bunk wearing prison-issue pants and a strapped undershirt which left exposed two tattoos. The one on his left forearm read, “Born to Lose,” while on his upper right arm was etched a heart with ribbon. Inside the heart was inscribed “Diane,” the name of Hoss's wife. Hoss told Robinson about the “trumped-up case.” Robinson, who'd heard ten thousand sorry tales of innocence throughout his career, listened as Hoss gave his version of that Good Friday night with that wild teen girl out for vengeance … “an' I already got an appeal in the works.”

Robinson made to leave. “Okay, Stasiu, hang in there and good luck. Let me know what's new.”

The next day there was yet another disturbance in the jail, not too serious but one more disruption on top of the others that were occurring with worrisome regularity. Robinson again approached the prison board requesting relief for the jail's bulging population. This time, the board agreed that the situation had become untenable and approved a transfer of three hundred inmates to the Allegheny County Workhouse, half empty at the time. Robinson wasted no time in directing his staff to provide him with a list of inmates good to ship out. Noted in the long columns of names submitted was Stanley Hoss. When he learned of his impending transfer, Hoss was gleeful, for he had already made his ever-fateful decision to escape.

. . .

Since the bold breakout by Richard Mayberry and his companions, security at the jail had tightened up considerably. Hoss's plan, now fomenting, would have a vastly greater chance of success once he got to the Allegheny County Workhouse, which was maintained and serviceable but, after one hundred years, deteriorating or, as Hoss appraised it, “soft.”

Nine miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, the sprawling workhouse had originally been named the Workhouse and Inebriate Asylum. With its huge cell blocks, administration buildings, and on-site homes, together with seven hundred acres of workable farmland, the place consumed all the western outskirts of little Hoboken, the early name for the present-day borough of Blawnox. Every few decades, the workhouse was expanded. By the 1930s, it could hold fifteen hundred prisoners, with sentences ranging from thirty days to thirty years, accepting convicts from Pennsylvania's western thirty-two counties.

For a century, prisoners had been brought to the county workhouse by the noon train from Pittsburgh. The men were handcuffed and always sat in the front seats of the “Smoker,” the first car of the train. Some inmates regarded doing time at the workhouse as easy, even healthful, since it obliged many to become sober for the first time in months. Inmates whose offenses were nonviolent were judged to be suitable for farm work—cultivating the fields, gardens, and orchards or tending the pigs, hogs, horses, or the milking herd. There was even a creamery, where butter was made twice a week.

The inmates always included a good number of ordinary drunks, who'd “drink everything, even bay rum”; these “bay rummers” (in the prison lingo) were regarded as a group distinct from men imprisoned for serious crimes like assault and worse, who were known as the “convicts.” It was the sobered, nonviolent bay rummers who were allowed to work in the fields or the barns, outside the great walls. The convicts were kept inside, making shoes, barrels, brooms, or rugs.

To the relief of Warden Robinson, about three hundred inmates were transferred from the county jail to the county workhouse on July 29, 1969. Along with the rest of the new receptions at the workhouse, Hoss was fingerprinted, photographed, issued prison blues—an uncomfortable, thick, part-wool shirt, and pants with only a single pocket in front—and assigned a cell on the fourth- or top-tier O and P ranges of the West Block. This block, the longest in the United States with sixty-two cells straight, could alone house five hundred men, although many of the cells were empty in these summer months.

After only two days of settling in, Hoss, clearly no bay rummer, was assigned work in the textile shop. The shop's supervisor, fifty-one-year-old Frank Petika, frowned when he saw Hoss come into his shop. He knew Hoss from a previous lockup and, frankly, didn't care for him.

“Mr.
Petika, I see you still got your cushy job makin' us cons sweat blood,” was Hoss's unsmiling greeting. Petika didn't know if Hoss was joking or not, but the jibe displayed the typical proclivity among criminals to assume that everyone else has it better than they do.

Frank Petika himself had grown up the hard way. After eighth grade, at age fifteen, his father had said it was time for young Frank to go to work. The coal mines were really the only thing open to boys in his poor circumstances, but it was 1933 and any employment was a godsend. Only after twenty-five years “in the ground” did Petika make it out of the mines to begin a second career at the workhouse.