CHAPTER 8

THE COP ON THE COUCH GRINNED APPRECIATIVELY AS THE VIDEO-TAPED images of thinly clad teenaged cheerleaders pranced around the television screen.

Debbie Does Dallas was perhaps the most popular porn flick of the 1980s, so it wasn’t strange that even a cop would take time out to admire and appreciate a pirated VHS offering of those supple young bodies at play. Only this cop, lounging on Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw’s well-worn couch with its perhaps fake leather upholstery and hidden holes from cigarette burns, was taking his porn break in the middle of a crime scene.

What a fucking load, the detective sergeant arriving upon the scene thought.

“Take out that fucking tape!” ordered the veteran investigator, Dominick DiPaolo. “Shut off the damned TV. Take a ride. We’ll call you back when we leave.”

The grossly overweight uniformed officer looked more offended than ashamed as he lumbered away.

Earlier, after the discovery of the grisly murder was reported to police headquarters, the patrol division officer had been assigned to “stand by” at the house to protect the crime scene. But now, being unceremoniously kicked out, the cop knew better than to protest. Complying with the detective’s order, he mumbled a few unintelligible words and left the warmth of Dovishaw’s house for the cold January morning that was taking forever to dawn outside.

DiPaolo, long the Erie Police Bureau’s foremost homicide detective, had been through this drill many times before. He and his partner, Detective Don Gunter, had arrived at 1634 West 21st Street only minutes earlier. It didn’t take DiPaolo very long to size up the chaos he had witnessed so many times during past crime scene examinations:

Cops – uniformed and plainclothes – were in every room. They peered through doors, windows and closets. They pulled open kitchen cabinet and dresser drawers and examined papers, underwear, whatever was inside them. Like kids in a toy store, it seemed to DiPaolo, they were somehow compelled to not just touch, but handle everything they saw.

Jesus! Protect the crime scene? What a joke. More like they had orders to destroy the immediate environment.

Surveying the disorganized chaotic activities that more than disrupted the murder scene, DiPaolo exhaled deeply, then loudly raised his voice for all to hear:

“Everyone! Listen up!”

When he had the attention of the house-roaming hoard, he directed:

“Everyone in the living room! Now!”

When the last cop – there were perhaps 10 spread out into every room in the small Dovishaw house – had straggled into the front room, DiPaolo was terse:

“Detectives Weindorf and Kuhn will brief us. Everyone else, out! Do not touch anything – anything! – more! Now, as quickly as you can, please leave the premises.”

More typical grumbling from typical cops, many of them who got their jobs the old-fashioned way – through Erie’s not-too-thinly veiled political patronage system. Despite Civil Service requirements, it had always been an “open secret” in Erie. Who you “knew” was always the determining factor when searching for a city job – including on the police force or in the fire department. But like the “stand-by” patrol officer before them, these officers at least now knew this was Dom DiPaolo’s case, DiPaolo’s crime scene until he said otherwise.

It took several minutes before the last cop finally had trudged out, leaving DiPaolo, Gunter, and the two night shift detectives alone in the house. Detective Sergeant DiPaolo took another deep breath, then surveyed his surroundings. Shit. What a fucking mess. Created by his own department’s inefficiency? He recalled the December 1980 Corporal Robert Owen murder crime scene, also destroyed by Erie Police Department shoddiness and inefficiency, and thought, “They never learn.” Or was the victim, Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw simply the pig DiPaolo had always sized him up to be?

Either way, the house was a colossal disaster. Probably ransacked by the perp – or the perps, he thought.

Wow! Bolo “Ash Wednesday” Dovishaw, DiPaolo thought. Dead. Murdered. Is anyone surprised?

Less than an hour earlier – at 7:45 a.m. on Wednesday, January 5, 1983, Detective Sergeant DiPaolo had reported for work at Erie City Hall eager to follow up on a string of burglaries and robberies he suspected were tied to the heavy hitters of northwestern Pennsylvania’s organized crime underworld.

Before he had the opportunity to sip his first cup of murky detective division coffee, he was summoned into the presence of Detective Captain Charles McCurdy, a veteran, but garden-variety, by-the-book cop who on occasion acknowledged he mistrusted everyone, including his own mother. McCurdy, who lived until age 86 when he died in retirement in 2012, was another who had advanced through the ranks of the long-established political patronage system, based not on what he accomplished as a police officer, but how many votes he could muster for the party without making waves. In this case, the “party” was the Democratic political machine of Mayor Louis J. Tullio, now in his fifth four-year term.

Tullio’s iron grip over everything and anything that went on in City Hall was legendary. With Lou Tullio, who initially built his power base as secretary/business manager of the equally-politicized Erie School District two decades earlier, you either loved or hated the gregarious guy.

Dom DiPaolo? He loathed him. And he made no secret about his dislike for the mayor.

Still, despite the indisputable smut of Erie police politics, DiPaolo considered Charles “Cubby” McCurdy to be a straight shooter, albeit an almost comic book caricature of the universal police tagline, “To Protect and Serve.”

“EVERYONE’S a liar, cheat and thief,” McCurdy, with the look of a scolding parent, was often fond of telling anyone who would listen. “Everyone!”

“Even your mother?” someone would inevitably ask with a smirk.

“Everyone,” McCurdy would coyly smile. On this morning, Mc-Curdy was wearing his well-weathered brown checkered sport coat, shiny-seated blue serge trousers, tan shirt and dark blue, perhaps grease-spotted tie. With heavy, black work shoes and white tube socks, Mc-Curdy never made anyone’s best-dressed list. Nearing the end of an unremarkable career, he was seeking neither glory nor additional criminal cases for his résumé. Now approaching his pension, McCurdy operated on one speed: coast. But at heart, he was a good cop.

DiPaolo found the detective captain in a rather foul mood as he entered McCurdy’s closet-sized office and initially learned of Erie’s first recorded homicide for 1983. Tersely, without emotion, McCurdy broke the news to DiPaolo: The body of one Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw, a major sports-betting bookie and wise guy wannabe, had been found the night before in his basement. He had been shot once in the head. His hands and feet were bound. He was covered by a rug and dirty laundry.

“That’s all I know for sure,” McCurdy said.

But McCurdy wanted DiPaolo to know in no uncertain terms that the chief of police himself, Richard Skonieczka, had ordered McCurdy to assign DiPaolo to the case and authorize him to pick his own investigative team. Somehow, the chief’s vote of confidence offered DiPaolo little solace or comfort. The chief, who died in 2012, wasn’t a bad cop, not really. But DiPaolo knew he was close pals with Mayor Tullio. After World War II, Skonieczka was one of several high-ranking police officials who had played football at Gannon College for Lou “The Coach” Tullio, himself a former star at Holy Cross College.

“Look, you know all those guys,” McCurdy offered, as though DiPaolo and the wise guys all belonged to the same restricted country club. “I’m thinking the wise guys – they’ve got to know something.”

No shit, DiPaolo thought. But he never actually said it out loud. McCurdy got enough ribbing from the troops. Why should DiPaolo add to the torment?

“Oh, yeah, there’s one thing more,” McCurdy suddenly remembered, his recollection coming in almost hushed, conspiratorial tones as to make sure no one walking by the office would overhear. Erie cops were often a funny bunch when it came to “their” personal cases. Many, though not DiPaolo, were territorial, never wanting to share vital information that would give anyone else their collar.

“Yeah? What’s that?” DiPaolo asked.

“Frank Rotunda’s involved.”

“What do you mean ‘Rotunda’s involved?’” DiPaolo almost choked on his coffee, incredulous Captain McCurdy had failed to mention that little tidbit earlier.

“Hey, what I know is just sketchy stuff,” McCurdy said, somewhat apologetically. “Apparently the wise guys actually called Rotunda to Dovishaw’s house when they found Bolo’s body. It was Rotunda who called it in to the station last night.”

DiPaolo knew all too well of Rotunda’s reputation, or lack of it. Rotunda, not very effective as a detective, had loose personal ties to the underworld, ties that somehow never resulted in arrests or solved cases. DiPaolo had long suspected Rotunda was one of those rare “dirty” cops, but he could never prove it.

“Look,” McCurdy said in a conciliatory fashion, “Joe Weindorf and Norm Kuhn are still at Bolo’s house. They’ll give you a run-down on everything they have. They’re thorough guys. Then the investigation is all yours. Just get over there.”

At least DiPaolo respected Detective Sergeants Weindorf and Kuhn. DiPaolo collected his partner, Gunter, and together they headed to the West 21st Street home of Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw. What DiPaolo could not have known at the time, however, was how long this murder case would dominate his life, how far its tentacles would stretch into Erie’s organized crime fraternity, or how it also would reach into the highest echelons of the bureau of police and even some in Erie’s banking community. But at that moment, he was ready to begin.