CHAPTER 15

A Likely Suspect

From the start, Barbara Kogan was considered a person of interest in her husband’s murder.

On that fateful October morning, Billy Kogan, at the time a college student, called his mother from the hospital and, when she didn’t answer, left a message telling her that his father had been gravely wounded.

Afterward, at 11:52 a.m., Barbara, who would later describe herself as distraught, telephoned her parents, Emanuel and Rose Siegel, at their home in Puerto Rico, purportedly to tell them the bad news about George. Her parents had lived in San Juan for twenty years and, at the time, were in an apartment next door to their oldest daughter, Elaine. Emanuel had built up a decent public-relations business and also published a popular tourist newspaper. If Emanuel and Rose were wealthy, it didn’t show. As they had when their daughters were growing up in New Jersey, the Siegels lived conservatively.

“George has been shot,” Barbara told her parents.

She spoke to them for a total of seven minutes. The shortness of that call, and a series of others that same day, led police to suspect that the calls weren’t merely to comfort a grieving daughter, but, rather, were regular and sporadic updates on George’s condition, which Barbara was getting when hospital personnel called several times asking her to visit her husband, because his odds of surviving his injuries were low.

At 12:10, eighteen minutes after Barbara’s initial contact, Barbara’s father returned her call. They spoke just three minutes.

Then, at 3:02 p.m., Barbara rang them again to give them an update. During that conversation, Barbara spoke for eleven minutes with her parents. She called them again an hour later, at 4:01 p.m., and, when they didn’t answer, left a brief message. She tried again at 4:40 and spoke with them for eight minutes.

At 5:38 p.m., Barbara once again telephoned her parents, apparently to tell them that George had died, after the hospital had notified her. She called back again at 7:01 p.m. and talked for another eleven minutes. Then, her parents called her at 8:43 p.m. That call lasted seven minutes. Finally, Barbara spoke with her parents one last time that night, at 9:07 p.m., for about ten minutes.

But more noteworthy to investigators were the long-distance phone calls that morning originating from the Siegels’ Puerto Rican home to Manuel Martinez’s law office in New York City. Manuel was the attorney Barbara had hired a couple months earlier to find her a divorce lawyer in Puerto Rico. The Siegels’ calls to Manuel were short, indicating that they were messages left on an answering machine. They took place before Barbara had called her parents. The first one, at 10:18 a.m. on October 23, was a minute long and placed from the Siegels’ home phone to Martinez’s office. At that point, George had been shot just a few minutes earlier and the family hadn’t yet been notified. At 11:02, a fifty-second call was placed to Martinez’s office from the Siegels’ home, which Manuel later said was made by Barbara’s father, Emanuel.

Then, at 11:17 p.m., a call that lasted four minutes was made from the same number at the Siegels’ home to Martinez’s residence. It was the last call of the day that interested the police. Martinez later said the calls to his office, which his answering machine had picked up, proved that he was in House Court that day and not in his office. Martinez explained away the calls as Barbara’s father wanting to have documents notarized and said it was coincidental that the calls began just minutes after George’s death.

That same afternoon, John Lyons, the man Barbara had been seeing and who had accompanied Manuel Martinez to George’s funeral, also telephoned Martinez. “[John] called me at my law office in the afternoon of October 23, 1990, [and] told me George Kogan had been shot and was still alive at the hospital,” Manuel explained.

What Barbara wouldn’t learn until later was that John Lyons was a CIA agent. As the murder investigation closed in on Barbara, Lyons was suddenly transferred to Afghanistan as a “State Department official.”

“I originally thought he was Barbara’s accountant,” Martinez said. After he got to know Martinez better, Lyons told him he was “an international salesman of military equipment.”

“He told me he had completed a sale of military hardware to North Korea. I never knew he worked for the CIA until [years later],” Martinez would later say.

When it came to John Lyons, it was difficult to tell fact from fiction. Martinez said he didn’t know where Barbara had met Lyons. But Barbara utlimately told a judge that it was Martinez who’d introduced her to Lyons.

Martinez changed his stance and later said it was Barbara who’d introduced him to Lyons. “I met John Lyons through Barbara,” Martinez explained, saying he “spoke with [Lyons] over the phone several times.” He also said, “I met him with Barbara once for Sunday brunch. He played second fiddle to Barbara, who carried the conversation.”

However Martinez and Barbara had met quiet John Lyons, he became a curious background character in the case, one who’d been a companion, and possibly a confidant, and who spent time with Barbara in the weeks leading up to her husband’s murder.

To the outside world, Barbara’s relationship with John Lyons seemed cordial, almost professional, not romantic. They didn’t display affection toward each other, yet they were constant companions. Because of his connection to Barbara and Manuel Martinez, Lyons would later play a significant, albeit absent, role as a figure in the George Kogan murder case.

*   *   *

Barbara and George Kogan’s acrimonious divorce was no secret. The divorce was not Barbara’s idea, but since her husband had fallen in love with another woman, there was no stopping it. Setting the pace for the murder investigation were Mary-Louise Hawkins’ words at the murder scene, “It was his wife!” From that moment on, Barbara became the key suspect in her husband’s murder.

In fact, she appeared to be the only person of interest, at least for the first few years. It’s common practice for police to look at family members—especially spouses—as suspects, mostly to rule them out, so they can move on to other clues. In the Kogan case, Barbara’s involvement appeared to be the main scenario investigators probed.

Nevertheless, it would hardly be an overnight case. It would take nearly two decades and two criminal cases to move the investigation from the district attorney’s office and through the criminal court system.

It wasn’t just May Louise’s statement that caught detectives’ attention. It was Barbara’s actions, as well.

Just one day after the murder, a Wednesday, a police detective told the New York Times that Barbara’s silence, and her seeming avoidance of being interviewed, were hampering their efforts. The detectives thought Barbara’s behavior suspect, especially her absence at the hospital after the shooting. 19th Precinct officers and homicide investigators from the Manhattan North Homicide Squad began piecing together the mystery.

Publicly, detectives said they “had little to go on” from witnesses. Detectives were frustrated from the start, stunned by the lack of information they were able to gather from witnesses on that busy Manhattan morning. Several people at the scene only saw the immediate aftermath of the crime. The housekeeper had witnessed the shooting and the police had taken her statement, along with the others. The housekeeper’s statement, however, would later prove to be inadmissible and hearsay when police discovered that she had left the country and they were unable to locate her.

Police had, however, determined early on that the killer was a hired gun. “All indications are that [Kogan] was an intended target, and it was an assassination,” said police spokesperson Captain Stephen Davis, citing the use of a large-caliber revolver and the gunman’s cool demeanor. “Whoever wanted to kill George Kogan remains a mystery.”

A day after the shooting, Detective Mike Sheehan, a veteran homicide cop, drove to Barbara’s apartment and asked the door attendant to call her apartment. Barbara answered the phone and said she would meet him downstairs. “She never came down,” Sheehan reported. From their vantage point, Barbara appeared to be avoiding the police.

In his will, George had left the minimum legal amount of money to his wife, which was the interest on one third of his estate, the balance to his sons, which was split, and nothing to Mary-Louise Hawkins. But Barbara did not learn about George’s will until after his death. Before the murder, Barbara hired Norman H. Donald III, a prominent estate attorney, to help with the asset portion of her divorce. After George’s death, Donald arranged for Barbara to meet with detectives.

So, a day and a half after the murder, on that Wednesday night of October 24, three detectives from the 19th Precinct drove to the Times Square offices of Norman Donald, a partner with the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom—later considered a giant in the legal field—to speak to his client, Barbara Kogan, about her husband.

The detectives arrived that evening at Skadden’s skyscraper offices on Third Avenue between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Streets and interviewed Barbara with her attorney present.

“When was the last time you spoke with your husband?” a detective asked her.

“The night before he died,” she answered.

She also told detectives, “I was shocked when I was told [George] had been shot. It was terrible.”

Barbara explained that she’d spoken with George on the phone the night before his death to discuss divorce details. The former couple’s conversation had been pleasant, police later recounted to reporters. She and their son Bill had an appointment the next day, on the twenty-third, to hammer out a settlement. It had been long in the making, and Bill, especially, was anxious to get his parents past the divorce. He was worried about his mother, because she was still so upset about the split.

Mary-Louise Hawkins also told police that the conversation between Barbara and George the night before his death was uneventful. Mary-Louise was in the room when George spoke with Barbara, and nothing seemed amiss, she told them.

To a reporter, Barbara described her conversation with police as “amicable.”

On October 25, two days after the murder, The New York Times reported on the status of the case in an article headlined, “No Suspects in Killing of East Side Businessman.” The story quoted police as saying that as of late Wednesday, the same evening Barbara had spoken with detectives, while they had no suspects, their efforts “were being hampered in their investigation by the silence of the slain man’s estranged wife.”

That came as a surprise to attorney Norman Donald. A couple days later, in interviews with reporters, Donald repeated what investigators had told his client, that she was not a suspect in her husband’s death. Detectives told Donald that they had contacted law enforcement officials in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where George had lived most of his life and still had real estate and business holdings. They were looking into his financial interests.

At that early stage of the inquiry, information was being leaked to the media about the possibility of some of George Kogan’s negative business dealings turning deadly. “We are still looking at a number of possibilities,” a detective familiar with the case told Newsday reporter Mitch Gelman. “But the focus of the investigation is on his business partners. He owed a lot of people a lot of money.”

In an interesting aside, very early in the inquiry, police also publicly said that George Kogan had mob connections. This was reported in a Newsday article by Gelman and dated a couple days after the murder.

Another possibility was that the murder could have been a robbery gone bad. Cash—bills and change—was all over the sidewalk that morning. Could all that cash have popped out of George’s pockets from the force of being shot?

What police did know was that George had been shot at close range. But the case was baffling. It didn’t at that point add up to a robbery-turned-murder scenario and it didn’t fit the M.O. of a mob hit, nor did the wife seem likely to have done it. With no murder weapon, no real description of the shooter, and no hard evidence, it was a particularly difficult case to solve.

Still, as George Kogan lay on his deathbed in the hospital, police said his estranged wife was busy summoning a hairdresser to her Fifth Avenue apartment. They soon focused their attention on Barbara.