CHAPTER 7

The Hospital

On the sidewalk, an ambulance arrived with three paramedics, who knelt down to help George Kogan. Just a few minutes had passed since George had been gunned down, yet the street was already packed.

To get to the victim, paramedics had to break through the crowd and clear a path so they could begin working on George. They immediately checked the forty-nine-year-old for vital signs. They then covered him with a blanket to keep him warm. Within minutes, they called the physician on duty at New York Hospital’s emergency room.

“He’s breathing and semiconscious,” a medic said. They put an oxygen mask, which covered George’s nose and mouth, on his face as they prepared him for the short trip to the hospital. They didn’t see any spent bullets on the sidewalk. While medics could not fully assess the damage of the gunshot wounds because of all the blood, they assumed the injuries were massive, especially since the bullets and fragments no doubt remained in his body. They knew they needed to get George to the hospital, and stat. Paramedics prepared to transport him to the hospital, where a team headed by a surgeon would spend the next four hours trying to save him.

While George wasn’t completely unconscious, he could no longer speak, and his skin was ashen. He was slipping into a coma. “The ambulance medics picked him up on a gurney and took him away,” Crespo said. “That was the end of it.”

At least that was the end of it at 205 East Sixty-ninth Street. Meanwhile, one medic carried the oxygen tank while the other wheeled George on a gurney to the rear of the ambulance. One stayed by George’s side inside the ambulance, to monitor his vital signs, as the door closed. The driver flipped on the sirens and lights and rushed the five-block, two-minute route to New York Hospital at 525 East Sixty-eighth Street. The driver pulled up next to the curb, and waiting emergency personnel rushed outside to the ambulance as the medics rolled George Kogan’s gurney into the emergency room. George had lapsed into unconsciousness during the short ride to the hospital. But he was still alive.

Inside the emergency room a team of attendants assessed him. Then, with a physician, they prepared George for surgery. Dr. Michael Marano needed to stop the bleeding and see if he could remove the bullets and fragments. George’s wounds were life-threatening, and he was placed on the critical list.

For the next four hours, Marano and the medical team operated on George. One of the high-caliber slugs had gone straight through his body, entering his back and exiting his chest. Doctors were able to remove one of the bullets lodged in his chest. But one remained. He suffered from penetrating injuries and ballistic trauma with massive blood loss. Once they went into surgery, doctors discovered that one of the bullets had punched a hole in George’s heart.

As word of the shooting spread, friends and family gathered at the hospital. A woman at the scene, in the apartment lobby, asked Mary-Louise for her parents’ phone number and then called her mom for her.

With George on the way to the hospital, Mary-Louise returned to her apartment to call George’s sister, Myrna Borus. “She was hysterical, screaming, and I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, and I had to slow her down, because I didn’t know what she was talking about,” Borus would say. But she did pick out from that conversation that Mary-Louise was about to leave for the hospital. “She told me which hospital, and I ran over,” Borus noted.

Mary-Louise acknowledged that after seeing George on the sidewalk, she “panicked, screamed, ran. I was grabbed back into the building, because everybody was sort of unsure what was happening and didn’t know if I was going to be next, or what, so I just panicked.” Mary-Louise had no recollection of what she’d said that morning. “There were people sort of gawking, and there were a couple of people who worked in the building, but I don’t remember anything else,” she said.

Mary-Louise, accompanied by a doorman, took a cab to the hospital. Once there, she called George’s sons, Billy and Scott. She told police that she also called George’s lawyers. One by one, family arrived at the hospital: Myrna and her daughter, along with Mary-Louise’s parents and Billy.

Once at the hospital, Billy called his mother. But Barbara didn’t pick up the phone in her Fifth Avenue apartment.

“Mom, Dad’s been shot. He’s in the hospital. They’re going to operate,” said a tearful Billy in his voice message to his mother. Then he assured her he would keep her informed and asked her to meet him at the hospital. He also told her that Mary-Louise was there.

Billy, beside himself, tried calling his mother again later, but still her answering machine picked up. Barbara eventually returned his call, but she remained at home. “She never came to the hospital,” Billy’s aunt, Myrna Borus, said, “but she kept calling.”

“Mom, maybe you should come,” Billy told his mother.

“I don’t think I should go, what with Mary-Louise there, Billy,” she said. “It might be uncomfortable.”

The decision not to visit her dying husband would come back to haunt Barbara. She would later tell a newspaper reporter she’d been at home and in distress, telling The Post she was in her apartment “screaming and in shock” and then “fell asleep.” Many did not believe her, especially since Barbara’s phone records later revealed she’d spent a good part of that time on phone calls.

Her divorce attorney, Richard Golub, when reached by a newspaper, said that for safety reasons, Barbara couldn’t go to the hospital; she was in fear for her life because a gunman was still on the loose and she too could be a target. “She wanted to be there at the end. Just because you are divorcing someone doesn’t mean you don’t still have feelings for them,” the attorney told the Post. But police wouldn’t provide Barbara armed protection at the hospital, “So I told her she shouldn’t leave the apartment,” Golub said. “She was very upset that she couldn’t be there. I’m very worried about her safety and the safety of the family. We don’t know who did this or where they could be.”

Hospital officials would later say they’d contacted Barbara several times, pleading with her to visit the hospital, because George wasn’t doing well and it could be the last time she’d be able to see him. Despite their pleas, Barbara stayed home.

Thus, prominently missing from George’s bedside was his estranged wife, who lived in the Olympic Tower at 641 Fifth Avenue, just a mile and three quarters from the hospital in Midtown Center. She could have easily caught a cab and been there in a matter of minutes.

At 11:38 a.m., about an hour and a half after the shooting, Barbara called her parents, Rose and Emanuel Siegel, at their home in Puerto Rico. The phone records showed it was a short conversation.

Barbara also called an unnamed friend who visited her at her apartment. Barbara had asked her friend to comb out her hair, in preparation for a trip to the hospital, should Barbara decide to go. The friend, it turned out, was a hairdresser.

At the hospital, a couple hours after arriving, Mary-Louise left briefly to go home, take a shower, change her clothes, and return to the waiting-room vigil, anticipating with George’s family word from doctors about his condition.

In the late afternoon, the hospital phoned Barbara a final time. The news was grave. Her husband had passed away just after 4 p.m., a hospital official told her. Doctors tried to revive him, but they were unsuccessful. They did what they could, but with injuries and damage to his liver, lungs, and heart, George had bled internally, and doctors could not stop the hemorrhaging.

Six hours after the shooting on October 23, doctors in the ICU’s recovery room officially pronounced George H. Kogan dead. As soon as George died, police elevated their investigation to a homicide instead of an attempted murder.

Family members at the hospital, unaware that George had died, waited for word about his condition. George’s sister, Myrna, later remembered in detail the distrubing turn of events: “They told us to sit somewhere and wait and that they would tell us. And by the time I went screaming to ask what was going on, it had been an hour that he had passed away and they didn’t tell me anything.”

Instead, it was Barbara, still officially George’s wife and the immediate next of kin, who was the first to be told. The news drifted out to George’s other family members, as well as to Mary-Louise, but only after it was obvious, from the doctors’ and nurses’ demeanor toward the family, that George’s status had gravely changed. His family members and Mary-Louise Hawkins, at the hospital together in the waiting room, were stunned not only that he’d been shot, but, now, that he was dead. They turned to one another for comfort.

George’s son Scott, in the meantime, had arrived at his part-time job at Sacred Heart University’s business administration department in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when a coworker shouted out to him from across a room, “Hey, Scott, the boss wants to see you.” Scott walked to the department director’s office and she told him there’d been an accident involving his father. His aunt Elaine, Barbara’s sister, made flight arrangements for the two of them and, later that day, they flew together to New York. At the airport to meet them was Scott’s brother, Billy, who gave them the grave news that their father had died.

About an hour and a half after her husband’s death, at 5:30 p.m., Barbara dialed her good friend Dawna Cole, who at the time lived in Norwich, New York. Barbara, Dawna said, was hysterical and wasn’t making sense. Dawna was surpised when Barbara asked if she knew the name of the attorney who represented their mutual friend, LuAnn Fratt, after Fratt killed her husband and was prosecuted for the crime. Fratt, whose attorney used a self-defense strategy, was later acquitted.

“Do you know who her lawyer was, in case I need one?” Barbara asked Dawna.

“I think it was Michael Dowd,” Dawna answered.

*   *   *

George Kogan’s body was taken to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office, which looks into suspicious and violent deaths.

The next morning, Myrna Borus drove from her New Jersey home to Manhattan to meet Officer Joseph Girimonte, the first officer at the crime scene, at the medical examiner’s office. Girimonte, who could not reach Barbara, needed Myrna to positively identify her brother’s body before the autopsy could be performed.

Staff gave Girimonte, who had been on the NYPD force since 1985, a photo of the newly deceased George’s face. Once Myrna arrived, Girimonte showed her the photo. George’s face was ghostly pale.

“Is this your brother, George Kogan?”

“Yes, that’s George,” said Myrna, through tears and overcome by the events of the day before. She, of course, recognized her brother. What she did not recognize was the death mask that his face had become. Girimonte extended his condolences. “I’m very sorry for your loss, ma’am,” he told her. “I know it’s not easy.”

It was true. And, for Myrna, unthinkable. George was gone. Never again would she be able to chat on the phone with her favorite brother, closer in age to her than their brother Lawrence, or travel with him, as they’d done over the years. She thought back to when her daughter had passed away and how she’d leaned on George during those sad days. And she thought about the good times nine years earlier, in 1981, when she’d taken a two-week vacation to Europe with George and Barbara, on a buying trip for their San Juan stores. Her brother “wanted me to learn the jewelry business,” Myrna later explained.

“We went to London, to Paris, and to Rome,” she recalled. While in Italy, “We went to Oscar’s in Milan.” George preferred staying at “only the top hotels, and always with a fancy car. Nothing but the best.”

Myrna was still processing the reality of losing George, especially the violent way he’d died, which made the loss even more difficult. She still couldn’t believe it. Myrna, along with the rest of the family, would never fully recover from the heartbreak of that misty fall morning when they lost George.

The same day Myrna positively identified her brother’s lifeless body, Dr. Aglae Charlot, an associate New York City medical examiner, prepared for the autopsy, number M909837. Twenty-four hours after the murder, the team of detectives on the Kogan case went to the city’s main morgue and, as the lead investigators, observed Doctor Charlot perform the autopsy on George Kogan’s body. Officer Joseph Girimonte was there as well.

George’s body had been refrigerated overnight at the morgue, located at First Avenue near Thirtieth Street, between two major city hospitals, Bellevue and NYU Medical Center. The body was cold as Dr. Charlot began her examination. She noted the height as five foot ten inches and the weight as 265 pounds. The body had “incised wounds” in the chest and torso that were made during surgery, and tubes were still in his nose and inside his mouth from when ER surgeons had worked on him the day before. The tubes were also visible in the photo Myrna had viewed at the medical examiner’s office. Three entrance wounds were in the back, and one had tiny abrasions consistent with injuries caused by gunpowder, from a muzzle that was about twelve to eighteen inches from the back when fired, according to notes written by Dr. Charlot. The bullets had stopped George Kogan in his tracks.

Charlot pulled the remaining bullet from George’s back. The first had been removed by a hospital surgeon the day before: the second went into George’s back and exited from his chest, but it was not recovered at the scene. Thus, the two pulled slugs, both deformed from entering his body, became the only physical evidence to help detectives in their hunt for the killer.

After completing the autopsy, Dr. Charlot filled out the death certificate and indicated the cause (multiple gunshot wounds) and manner (homicidal). With that, George Kogan’s death officially became the 673rd homicide in 1990 in New York City.

Detective John Kraljic, a ballistic and forensic firearms examiner with the NYPD’s Firearms Analysis Section, performed laboratory tests on the .44-caliber deformed slugs removed during the autopsy and surgery. What he learned was striking. One of the unforgiving bullets George was shot with was a copper-jacketed, hollow-point .44 caliber. Because it was a little larger than, say, a .38, Kraljic said in his report, “It has the potential to cause more damage.” The hollow point is “supposed to create more damage to the target that it hits. It also slows it down, so it doesn’t over-penetrate and go through the target.” Once inside the body, hollow points expand, or mushroom, and cause more damage. The other slug removed from his body was the same, except this one wasn’t a hollow-point round. “A man-stopper” is the nickname for the powerful .44-caliber bullet. According to a 2006 Strategypage.com article, “American troops prefer the century-old .44 caliber pistol, considered an accurate, high-velocity weapon, to lighter 9mm models.”

A Los Angeles Police SWAT-team member, who asked that his name not be used, said, “It is all about ‘stopping power.’ A forty-four will stop a grizzly bear.”

Don White, who was with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Department’s homicide investigation division in San Antonio for eighteen years, analyzed the circumstances surrounding the Kogan shooting. If this was a contract hit, he said, the goal “is two shots to the body, one to the head.” But as George flew forward, that was not possible. The final shot appeared to have been fired when George was on the ground, which could explain why two bullets did not exit his body, because the ground may have prevented them from doing so. At close range, there would be very little bullet expansion inside the body, White said: “No expansion, no large hole.”

That also explained why door attendant Moses Crespo did not immediately notice the wounds on George’s back. “At first, I didn’t know what was wrong with George,” Crespo said. “I asked him, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ He told me he was shot. Then I looked at his back and saw the blood start to seep through his shirt. But I did not see that at first.”

According to White, “The forty-four is a big bullet, and it travels fairly fast. What you can get is a sudden increase in blood pressure, from the pressure of the bullets, and this will turn out the lights, so to speak, very quickly.” And it did. George, within minutes of being shot, lost consciousness after talking to Moses. “The shooter may have even used a three-alloy metal that is very hard,” White explained. “You’d expect the bullets to go all the way through and exit. The bullets, if found, are hard enough that the lands and grooves don’t show up. Ballistics would have a hard time with that.” As it turned out, ballistics tests were inconclusive—other than identifying the type of gun used to fire the bullets—because there was no murder weapon with which to compare the bullet fragments. The unusual manufacturing process of the snub-nosed barrel, Don White said, leaves distinctive marks on each slug. But without the gun, ballistic and forensic firearms examiner John Kraljic, along with homicide detectives, reached a dead end.

At that early stage in the case, detectives did not yet have a suspect. But this much they knew: The gunman was either a professional hit man or someone with a grudge against George Kogan. The shooting, they said, was not random. And whoever shot George wanted him dead.

Investigators hit the Lenox Hill neighborhood, combing the area to search for clues to help them learn the identity of the shooter. Cops began piecing together a timeline surrounding George’s murder.

Officer Henry Medina, a twenty-nine-year veteran at that point, was with NYPD’s Emergency Squad Unit 2 and arrived at the scene to set up perimeters and help in the investigation. Each member of this unit was trained to serve as an emergency medical technician and to assist police officers. When Medina received the call that a person was shot in front of 205 East Sixty-ninth, his unit headed out and arrived three minutes later. “I observed a white male on the sidewalk with three gunshot wounds to him. We took out our medical equipment and we were going to start CPR on him, and then the New York City emergency ambulance arrived on the scene, and we assisted them in putting him onto the ambulance and they took him to the hospital,” Medina said. “We tried to give him oxygen. After he was put in the ambulance, we roped off the area of the address and we searched for evidence.”

Medina, who went on to receive his department’s Medal of Valor in 2004, walked a zigzag path across the wide sidewalk in search of evidence. But police were unable to spot any tangible evidence at the scene. “We were looking for a weapon that was used, spent cartridges, or spent rounds,” he said. Because the gunman had used a revolver, it would not have left behind spent shell casings. Instead, the casings remained inside the gun. But police did not know that was the case until bullets were removed from George during emergency surgery and during the autopsy.

Officer Girimonte, as a patrol officer, finished stringing yellow police tape to clearly define the perimeter around the spot where George was shot and to keep curious onlookers from walking all over the crime scene, contaminating possible evidence.

At 10:20 a.m., NYPD Sergeant Joe Fornabaio arrived to help with interviews. He interviewed Beverly Kantor, who had stepped out of her parked car to walk to a nearby market, only to see the shooting just after it happened. “I looked up and saw a white male holding a gun,” she told police detectives, “and I ducked down, because I didn’t want to be shot at.”

Shortly after Sergeant Fornabaio arrived on the scene, homicide detectives Mike Sheehan and Anthony Vasquez also responded to the call at 10:25 a.m. They were there fifteen minutes later to interview more witnesses, including Moses Crespo, who relayed what he had seen.

The detectives and their investigative team spent the day at the scene, diagramming it, marking the evidence, including the coins, bills, and groceries scattered about the sidewalk, gathering what little evidence there was. The rain-soaked sidewalk hindered them; there were no fingerprints or footprints to dust.

Also arriving on the scene was Deputy District Attorney Joel Seidemann, with the Manhattan DA’s murder unit. He was on homicide call that day, so Seidemann too headed to the scene of the crime soon after notification.

In the meantime, Sheehan and Vasquez spoke with witness Roger Wideman, a Federal Express delivery person who happened to be at the scene. Wideman had just driven up and jumped out of his delivery truck; he stood at the service entrance at 205 East Sixty-ninth. Suddenly, “three or four” shots rang out, he explained. He immediately looked up and saw a thin white man, about five foot ten inches tall, hurrying up Sixty-ninth, then turning north onto Third Avenue. Wideman told NYPD detectives that the gunman wore a dark-colored trench coat and a neon-colored cap, and that his hands were near his waist area. Wideman walked toward the victim and saw that George was shot, but since others were starting to approach him, too, he left the scene and continued on his route. Near Sixty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue, Wideman “saw a man, possibly the perp, running and looking back,” he told police. The man headed toward Madison Avenue, where Wideman got a closer look and a better description. The suspect was in his forties, about five foot eleven inches tall, weighed about 165 pounds, had the beginnings of a gray-and-brown beard, wore dark glasses, and had not yet ditched the trench coat and bright-colored cap. Wideman was sure it was the same man he had seen standing near the victim a few minutes earlier.

As detectives Sheehan and Vasquez continued their interviews, Officer Joseph Hamilton with NYPD’s Crime Scene Unit got a call at 11:20 a.m. to respond to 205 East Sixty-ninth. From the Bronx, at Third Avenue and Fordham Road, the unit headed to the Upper East Side. They arrived thirty-five minutes later to “a taped-off area in front of the building, detectives, and not much else,” Hamilton said. “I made a physical examination of the scene, tried to make note of anything of importance at the scene, and took seven photographs.” He, too, found no tangible evidence after spending about thirty to forty-five minutes at the scene.

Meanwhile, Sheehan and Vasquez interviewed another eyewitness, Terence Grau, who was at a pay phone on the southwest corner of Sixty-ninth and Third Avenue when he heard what he called “four shots.” Grau looked down Sixty-ninth and saw a white man, thirty-five to forty years old, five foot ten with glasses, wearing a red lumberjack-type shirt underneath a nondescript outer garment. The suspect ran as he turned north onto Third Avenue, turning his head and looking back as he fled. According to the police report from Grau’s interview: “Before the male got to the corner of Sixty-ninth and Third Avenue, [Grau] sees the male attempting to put something into his [jacket] pocket and having trouble doing so. Before he gets to the corner, the male secrets the object around his waist area. He thinks the male had the gun in his left hand. Asked how he would know it was a gun, he stated it was the way the man held it.”

Detectives Sheehan and Vasquez also questioned Hector Agstini, who had been working as a repairperson two doors up at The Fairfax luxury residences at 201 East Sixty-ninth. He’d been on break, standing just inside the lobby doors, when he heard what he told investigators were “four shots.” Then, he saw a partially bearded man, about forty to forty-five years old and wearing glasses, a bright green day-glo baseball cap, and a dark gray vest with light gray sleeves. The man was “walking fast toward Third,” according to his statement to police. “He further observed this male place what appeared to be a handgun in his waistband. Hector didn’t observe where this male headed after hitting Third Avenue,” according to the police report.

Later in the day, Officer Girimonte—still on duty and wearing his navy blue uniform—went to the hospital to check on the status of George Kogan. “I remember seeing the gentleman that I had seen in the street on the operating table with his chest open, and he was deceased. He had died,” he would later say. The first officer to arrive at the scene immediately after the crime, it was his job to keep in contact with the family and do the follow-up with the victim, checking on his condition. As a second-generation cop, he’d been exposed plenty of times to a variety of situations involving families of victims. It was Officer Girimonte’s job to remain unemotional and professional, especially since this attempted homicide would now become a full-blown murder investigation.

At 5 p.m., Charles Hage, twenty-seven years old and in New York City visiting his brother, telephoned NYPD’s 19th Precinct to tell police what he had seen earlier in the day. Officer Steve Melluso, who had been at the scene that morning, took the call. Hage told Officer Melluso that he’d happened to be standing on the northwest corner of Sixty-ninth and Third just after ten o’clock when he heard what sounded like three gunshots. Hage then saw a man running on Third Avenue, away from the scene. Hage also mentioned that the suspect had a reddish-gray beard and looked like he was carrying a Walkman.

One of the first questions a homicide detective asks is who might benefit from the murder. The answer in the Kogan case came two days after the murder, when a cursory look by investigators into George Kogan’s insurance papers showed that his estranged wife, Barbara, was the main beneficiary of Kogan’s $4.8 million insurance policies. For detectives, it served as potential circumstantial evidence and a possible motive for murder.

The killing was called the worst murder in New York City in recent history. The front-page headlines the next morning screamed “MURDER.” The front page of The New York Post read, “Millionaire Slain on East Side.” Newsday’s headline said, “Daylight ‘Hit’ On Upper East Side.” United Press International’s headline story, which ran across the wire, read, “Police say real estate tycoon was target of a ‘hit.’”

Almost immediately, media interest shifted from focusing on the shooting to the details of the investigation. Newsday assigned newspaper reporter Mitch Gelman the story. “I worked in police headquarters for Newsday. Whenever there was a homicide in New York City, the police department precinct would be recorded, and, handwritten on a white sheet of paper, the address, male, white, the age, a name if they had it, and what had transpired. And depending upon the case, we decided at the paper who was in the best position of covering it.” As it happened, the George Kogan murder occurred when Gelman was on duty. “I have a general recollection of the case when it happened,” he said. “There weren’t a lot of murders at the time on that side of Manhattan.” Gelman also remembered the funeral service, because he’d gotten a parking ticket outside the chapel on the busy Upper East Side.

Gelman wrote what he called a “second-day story” that appeared two days after the murder, on page 6 of Newsday, with a headline that read, “Love, Money Focus Of East Side Murder Probe.” The article began, “Real estate developer George Kogan was gunned down on an Upper East Side street Tuesday for either love or money.”

“Detectives yesterday probed the gambling connections of a luxury resort and casino that Kogan developed in San Juan and recently sold to a group of Brooklyn investors and Kogan’s other real estate dealings,” the article continued. Police told Gelman, “Kogan had spent a good part of his life in San Juan.” The article also said police interviewed acquaintances “about Kogan’s personal life and his pending divorce, which was bitterly contested, according to friends and others involved in the proceedings.”

That same day, police tried unsuccessfully to speak with Barbara. “The girlfriend has been very cooperative,” a police detective told Gelman about Mary-Louise. “We still want to talk to the wife.”

Attorney Aaron Golub explained Barbara’s decision not to immediately speak with officers: “I don’t think she’s being uncooperative. [Police officers’] expectations of interviewing someone immediately after a tragedy like this are unrealistic.”

*   *   *

Just a day after the murder, investigators were already building a profile of the killer, based upon information they’d gathered. According to police, the gunman, based on witness accounts, was a white man about five foot ten inches tall, weighing roughly 165 pounds. He fired the three shots from a high-caliber handgun—specifically, a Bulldog .44. “This was a pure hit. There was no robbery involved,” one investigator familiar with the case told Newsday.

The Bulldog revolver is a high-powered, five-shot handgun that uses a .44 special high-caliber bullet. It was a top-selling gun in the 1980s for manufacturer Charter Arms. It was also the weapon of choice for serial killer David Berkowitz, nicknamed the “Son of Sam” and “The .44-Caliber Killer,” who went on a murder spree in 1976 and ’77 in New York City. “There are only about ten guns that will shoot a .44,” said a Los Angeles Police Department undercover detective, “and they are big handguns to be able to handle the pressure created by firing that beast.” The Bulldog, meant for use at close range, fit the bill for George Kogan’s killer. It told police that the killing was not random, that the shooter had planned how and when he was going to hit George, and, particularly, that he was planning to hit his victim at close range. Also, the shooter was able to easily conceal the snub-nosed revolver by tucking it into his waistband. The gunman needed to be an experienced shooter, White said, because of the powerful recoil of the Bulldog, which requires expert, hands-on experience. With that type of weapon used in a brazen, daylight shooting in a public setting, NYPD investigators knew from the start that the killer was a professional hired gun.

Detectives from the Manhattan North Homicide Squad—a prestigious unit of veterans—tried to make sense of the case as they pieced together the details of George’s life. The team interviewed his friends, family, and international business associates. Investigators admitted that they “had little to go on” from witnesses. Even so, from the little evidence they had and the circumstances under which George was killed, they continued to believe the killer was a hired gun. They also said they hoped leads to a suspect would emerge as they looked closer at George’s complex web of finances, which stretched from the Caribbean to the East Coast.

Early in the probe, quoting unnamed sources, Newsday, in an October 26, 1990, article, reported that George Kogan had “ties to Puerto Rican gamblers and reputedly to Brooklyn mobsters” that could have led to his death. Reporter Mitch Gelman cited police as saying that George had been living beyond his means and owed money to “many people.” Investigators probed the nuances of his bitter divorce and looked into reports that he was “living off the wealth of a woman he moved in with two years earlier,” Gelman reported. Detectives, the article said, were ruling out nothing in their probe. Also, an unidentified friend of George told the New York Post that the shooting didn’t surprise him. “I’m not shocked by this because there was another side to George,” he told the newspaper.

Investigators emphatically said Kogan was the target of a “hit” and they were looking to question Kogan’s estranged wife, Barbara, and others about the killing.

Years later, Barbara Kogan’s attorney would suggest a reason for Kogan’s murder. “[George] dealt with underworld characters on a daily basis, and, most importantly, he stiffed everybody he ever did business with, not just his wife,” defense lawyer Barry Levin said.

Captain Stephen Davis, who at the time was a New York City Police Department spokesperson, broke the news to the press that the murder was a hitman’s doing, noting that George had not been robbed of money. But that did not explain witness accounts that cash was scattered all over the sidewalk near where George had been gunned down. The police had not yet interviewed Barbara Kogan, the captain said, because she was “under sedation,” according to her lawyer. Detectives had already interviewed Mary-Louise Hawkins. Captain Davis told reporters that he was unable to confirm a report in the New York Post about the Kogans and their “messy divorce battle” in which George had attempted to freeze his estranged wife’s bank accounts and other assets.

Two days after the murder, an investigator, identified only as a “city detective,” told reporter Mitch Gelman, “The next step [in the investigation], after we talk to the rest of the cutthroat real estate people and women in Kogan’s life here in New York, will be to bring in the authorities in San Juan (Puerto Rico). Right now, there is no telling where this will go.”

Police learned that George owned real estate in New York with a total fair market value of $1.85 million, assets considered community property in the Kogans’ divorce proceeding. This was in addition to the hefty life insurance policies taken out on George’s life and left to Barbara, making her a prime suspect.