CHAPTER 6

Scene of the Crime

“Good morning, Moses,” George said to the doorman as he walked through the lobby of 205 East Sixty-ninth, George and Mary-Louise’s tony high-rise apartment. As he stepped outside, a light, crisp, morning rain was falling, invigorating George as he walked the block to a neighborhood market.

It was just after 9:30 as he made his way in the fall drizzle. George wasn’t in a hurry to get to work at his Fifth Avenue antiques shop. But the rain—and the sixty-degree temperature—speeded up his step as he hurried to the Third Avenue market to pick up groceries for a late breakfast with Mary-Louise. George, dressed in sweat pants and a T-shirt, carried two bags from the Food Emporium back to his apartment.

On his way back, as the signal light turned red, he hastily crossed Third Avenue, navigating traffic in concert with other pedestrians, as he turned the corner onto Sixty-ninth Street toward home, while skirting cars that zipped by. Waiting for him inside his ground-floor apartment was Mary-Louise. Their home, where he’d lived with her for the last two years, represented a new beginning for George, and he relished every moment they shared together. He slowed, then veered left on the sidewalk as he got closer to the entrance of the residential co-op. Flanking the canvas-canopied doorway were extra-large stone Victorian urn planters holding juniper trees. He passed the door to a private doctor’s office just twenty feet before the entrance to the first floor of his building. Across the sidewalk from the office was a cypress tree large enough for someone to move behind and not be noticed. But George wasn’t thinking about any of that. He just wanted to get out of the cool morning air and into the apartment. He didn’t pay attention to the noise of the construction workers just across the street as he passed them on his way home.

George enjoyed living in Lenox Hill. He and Mary-Louise had redecorated the interior of their apartment with high-end antiques, most of which were from George’s shop. The couple’s furnishings made for an elegant yet warm environment. The passion of their relationship had not died down after two years. George still felt like a teenager in love for the first time.

That morning was a typical weekday. Third Avenue, where George and Mary-Louise regularly walked, was abustle as usual with traffic. Five foot ten and carrying a few extra pounds, including the beginnings of jowls, George was trying to get in better shape, and the walks helped him with that. Still, physically he felt good.

Like many New Yorkers, George was a creature of habit. On this day, he simply walked to the market, then retraced his steps and quickly made his way home, as he had so many times before. He was light on his feet as a gunman suddenly came up from behind, stepping out from the shadows. With pistol drawn, the killer brazenly rushed toward George. No words were exchanged as the gunman pumped three .44-caliber bullets into George’s back at close range. George didn’t stand a chance.

Catapulted off the ground, George landed face down with his head toward Second Avenue and his body parallel to the building wall a few feet from the entrance to the doctor’s office.

George could hear his heart beating and feel a huge force inside, like a hand reaching in, squeezing his chest.

Doorman Moses Crespo had been working at the elegant pre-war building for more than twenty years when the shooting occurred. This particular morning, Moses had been sorting the mail, readying it to put into tenants’ mailboxes, while a coworker stood by to watch the door. “It was a busy morning,” Moses said. “This is a busy street.” He and the coworker heard the shots, but didn’t realize it was gunfire. When Moses finished sorting the mail, he walked to the front of the lobby toward the desk, which is when he heard the loud noise. “I heard some pop sound, you know, like shots.” It was the same sound he’d heard day after day as construction workers used power nail guns across the street. He didn’t think twice about the noise—until his coworker called out to him.

“What’s that in the mirror?” he asked Moses. Just inside the canopy, two large security mirrors were placed at each end, so that the person on duty could see who came and went. “Someone’s lying on the sidewalk.” The coworker looked closer into the mirrors to see who had fallen. “Moses!” the coworker said, alarmed. “It’s George Kogan!”

Just then, a housekeeper pounded on the oak-framed, heavy glass door, yelling, “Let me in!” She’d been walking toward George and was about to step under the canopy when the gunman, hot on George’s heels, caught up to him. As the housekeeper watched in horror, the suspect pulled a revolver from his belt, aimed straight for George’s back, and opened fire at close range, hitting his mark fast and furiously. One shot wasn’t enough. He pumped off two more rounds. The gunman made certain the bullets hit home.

The horrific scene unfolding before her eyes left the cleaning woman terrified and in a panic. “One of the ladies who works in the building rushed the door, saying, ‘Please! Hurry up! Open the door!’” Crespo said. She continued yelling out to Crespo until he unlocked the door and let her in. She would be the only eyewitness to see the entire shooting, from start to finish.

Inside the lobby, she was barely consolable.

That’s when Crespo ran outside to where George lay on the sidewalk. Moses, stunned by the events, bent down and talked to George while he was still conscious. Then, George rested the side of his face on the rain-soaked concrete and thought about death. His final request, made to Moses, was to summon Mary-Louise to his side. As Moses hurried away for help, George spoke his last words before slipping into unconsciousness: “I’m dying.”

Doing what George had requested—getting help and sending Mary-Louise outside to be with George—Moses hurried to just inside the building’s entrance and, using the lobby wall phone at his security post, called emergency 911, where a dispatch operator at the New York Police Communications office answered.

“911,” the operator said. “What is your emergency?”

“There’s been a shooting,” Moses said.

“What is the exact location of your emergency?”

“Two-oh-five East Sixty-ninth Street. A man has been shot. He’s on the sidewalk,” Moses told the dispatcher.

“What is your last name?”

“Crespo. C-R-E-S-P-O.”

“What is your first name?”

“Moses.”

“Who was shot?” the dispatch operator asked.

“George Kogan,” Moses said, before being asked to spell the name. “He lives here, at two-oh-five East Sixty-ninth. He’s outside.”

“Is he breathing?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. An ambulance is on the way and police are en route, sir.”

“Thank you.”

“Help is on the way,” the dispatcher assured him.

Moses hung up and rushed toward the back of the building, where George lived in Apartment 1D with Mary-Louise. He knocked on the door.

Inside, Mary-Louise thought to herself, George must have forgotten his key.

She’d been expecting her boyfriend to arrive home from the market. A minute later, Mary-Louise answered and appeared surprised to instead see Moses standing at the door. She could tell by the look on the doorman’s face that something wasn’t right.

“Is everything okay?”

“George wants to talk to you,” Moses said, without telling her the reason he was there. Moses did not want to be the one to break the news to Mary-Louise that her boyfriend had been gunned down and was on the ground, badly injured. Still, by Moses’s alarmed demeanor, she felt a foreboding as she hurried with Moses the short distance from her ground-floor apartment to the lobby.

Moses opened the street door for Mary-Louise, and she hurried outside. Just then, the sound of an ambulance’s siren filled the air as paramedics raced to the building. “They were here fast. An ambulance was already in the area when George was shot,” Crespo said.

Mary-Louise was in utter shock to find George sprawled on the sidewalk lying in a pool of blood. Groceries and cash were strewn all around him. Mary-Louise didn’t run to George. She stood frozen under the canopy about ten feet away, immobilized by fear. Her next reaction as she stood in front of the building was to cry out.

On the sidewalk next to George, “Loose change and bills were everywhere,” Crespo said. “I don’t know how the money got there. George was lying in the middle of it. Mary-Louise saw George and started screaming.” Witnesses picked up the money and handed the bills to Moses.

Other witnesses stood in stunned shock as the aftermath of the crime played itself out, unfolding like the scene in a murder mystery it was. Soon, a fleet of cop cars and emergency vehicles swarmed the street, and the squawk of police radio traffic punctuated the sounds of the city.

Moses stationed himself at the doorway of 205 East Sixty-ninth, making sure to keep the door locked. NYPD Officer Joseph Girimonte, a patrol cop, heard the dispatch call and hurried from the 19th Precinct, which covers the Upper East Side from Fifty-ninth to Ninety-sixth and from Fifth Avenue to the East River. “I was the first officer to arrive. I got to the scene. There was a fat person—a fat man—laying on the floor in front of that address,” Girimonte said.

Then, shortly after that, police officers Medina and Costleigh with the Emergency Service Unit heard a call come in at 10:10 a.m. “A person shot at 205 East Sixty-ninth Street,” it said. They headed out in the unit’s Truck 2 and arrived screeching to the curb.

The majority of officers and detectives on the scene were from the 19th Precinct, which was considered “ultra chic,” a primo assignment, and different from the nearby 20th. “Under the watchful eyes of the NYPD’s 19th Precinct, the Upper East Side is a conglomerate of tree-lined streets with million-dollar brownstones, multi-million-dollar apartments on Fifth and Park Avenues, and stores and bars on Madison and Lexington Avenues so swank that one needn’t even think of entering to buy something unless they can produce an American Express platinum card for inspection,” wrote Samuel M. Katz in his 1997 book Anytime, Anywhere about NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit. “The city’s Who’s Who live on the Upper East Side, from Mayor Rudolph Guliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir, to diplomats, dukes and duchesses, playboys (and some bunnies), high rollers, and captains of industry.”

At the scene of the crime, word quickly spread in the neighborhood that there had been a shooting, and a growing crowd of onlookers gathered. Mary-Louise, in the meantime, stood shocked, still crying and recoiling in horror before a doorman and a couple of residents, in fear that she too might be shot, ushered Mary-Louise back inside the lobby. But before they led her back inside, Mary-Louise shouted, “It was the wife! His wife did it!”

That single, spontaneous statement, uttered in a moment of intense emotion and heard loud and clear by two witnesses, set the course for what would become a nearly twenty-year police investigation of “the wife,” Barbara Kogan.