CHAPTER 27

ONCE BACK IN ERIE, DETECTIVE SERGEANT DIPAOLO WASTED LITTLE time in putting a different set of wheels in motion – wheels that would begin to confirm the Montevecchio deal.

At this sensitive point in the negotiations, DiPaolo knew Montevecchio couldn’t afford to allow anyone to know he was talking to his previous archrival, the Erie cop, or that he planned to turn Commonwealth’s evidence and testify for the government. That held doubly true, DiPaolo thought, for keeping Caesar Montevecchio’s longtime legal voice, criminal Attorney Leonard Ambrose, in the dark, at least for the time being. Ambrose had reportedly collected an astounding fee to represent Montevecchio in 1983, according to DiPaolo, money that had been turned over by Caesar’s brother, Albert, a successful New York businessman. Yet despite the hefty legal price tag, Montevecchio had been shocked with a 15-year sentence for concealing cocaine in his golf bag.

Fast forward to now. When these new indictments and charges had been splashed all over Erie’s two daily newspapers, Ambrose telephoned Montevecchio’s wife, Bonnie, to assure her that he was on the case and would rescue her husband, she later testified in open court.

Attorney Ambrose instructed Bonnie Montevecchio, “Don’t worry. I’ll do my best to get him out of this. Just have him call me when they bring him back to Erie,” Bonnie later testified.

Montevecchio himself believed that Ambrose might pose a problem for him and his proposed deal, which Caesar foolishly was prepared to negotiate all by himself. He told DiPaolo, “I’ve got to call him, you know. Because if I don’t call Lenny, then he’ll automatically know that something is up.”

After thinking over the situation, weighing the options and finding not many to consider, DiPaolo allowed Montevecchio to place the call to Attorney Ambrose.

“Hey, these are bullshit charges,” Caesar told his lawyer. Ambrose appeared concerned with his fee, Montevecchio later said. Ambrose is said to have asked Montevecchio if he could get $100,000 from Albert – up front – so he could begin preparing the defense case – according to what Caesar told DiPaolo. Later, Montevecchio conveyed the gist of the telephone conversation with Ambrose to DiPaolo.

“I told him that I had to talk with my brother first,” Montevecchio said. He explained to DiPaolo that Ambrose’s response was, “Well, when you do, call me.”

The cop had to chuckle. DiPaolo was thinking it should be Ambrose who was paying Montevecchio for getting him the 15 plus years in the slammer.

Next, DiPaolo and fellow investigators met with Dennis Pfannenschmidt of the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office. Pfannenschmidt was now assigned to the overall investigation. He was also responsible for the state’s special investigative grand jury. Together, investigators and prosecutors began to sort out the particulars, weighing the benefits and risks of dealing with the slippery and often questionable Caesar Montevecchio.

Caesar had asked for a coterminous sentence to run with the 15 years he was already serving on the cocaine charges. It was legalese, a technical concept akin to a concurrent sentence. Under Montevecchio’s proposal, he would plead guilty to all charges against him. He would also cop to one new count stemming from the Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw murder, and would receive a maximum sentence of 15 years. That was the deal.

And it was acceptable to DiPaolo solely because Montevecchio was the only wise guy who could give him the person who was believed to have ordered the Bolo Dovishaw hit, along with the “why,” and then give him the actual shooter.

No one else could.

And so it was on July 7, 1987, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office in Harrisburg confidently authorized a plea bargain arrangement with Erie’s most notorious career criminal, Caesar Montevecchio. But there was a stipulation from on high: The first time Caesar was caught in a lie, any lie, the attorney general’s office insisted, the entire deal would be terminated and all Montevecchio previously confessed to would be used against him – and with no coterminous! All totaled, just one lie would more than double his sentence to decades in prison.

Now, it was all up to Montevecchio.

DiPaolo hastily arranged for Caesar to meet with wife, Bonnie, so that Montevecchio would have a private moment to break this new development to her. Bonnie, however, knew something was up. When she entered the office of the Pennsylvania Attorney General situated in Erie’s downtown Griswold Plaza Post Office building, her eyes were already noticeably reddened, her mascara running from crying. As soon as Caesar revealed his intentions to her, she sobbed uncontrollably again.

Then Caesar Montevecchio wept.

As for Dom DiPaolo, he felt no compassion – only cold contempt for this career punk who spent a lifetime destroying not only what was once his own promising life, but the lives of so many innocent victims. The veteran Erie cop listened intently as Montevecchio, for the first time, admitted to his wife the crucial role he had so easily played in the Bolo Dovishaw hit. Somehow, the detective felt Bonnie suspected it all along.

Following Caesar’s emotional confession, Bonnie Montevecchio dried her tears somewhat, then turned to Dom DiPaolo with raised eyebrows. “You’ve been after him for such a long time – for years. Can we trust you now?” she asked.

“Let me explain something to both of you,” DiPaolo replied. “I knew your husband was involved with Bolo Dovishaw from day one. He denies he had a contract out on me, but insists it was his buddy, ‘The Hawk.’ But now I know the truth about what happened. And I could be in a position to stick it to Caesar big time. But I still have a job to do and my only concern right now is to clear all these cases and move on. As for trusting me, well, you’re going to have to trust me. There’s no alternative. You don’t have a choice.”

For a while, there was total silence. Then, Bonnie, her eyes still red and teary, hugged her husband and reluctantly left the building.

Caesar, apparently deciding he could do nothing other than trust the cop, began talking. He gave up the burglaries, the robberies, the Aziz solicitation to commit murder, all the many cocaine transactions. And the best part of all was that Caesar Montevecchio was finally naming names. All those who were involved in every job, every hit, every snort of the bright white powder – Caesar was giving them all up.

It took five hours. Five hours of robberies and burglaries and drug deals and enough names to fill the cop’s notebook two times over and even then some. Finally, Montevecchio and DiPaolo arrived at the “Golden Moment” for the Erie detective: The Frank “Ash Wednesday” Dovishaw murder.

But now, almost characteristically, DiPaolo thought, Caesar was beginning to balk.

“You just don’t know how hard this is for me to do,” Montevecchio started to whine.

DiPaolo showed no pity. “Fuck the drama,” the cop said with as much rancor as he could muster. He reminded Caesar of the bargain, the deal. And, he reminded Caesar of Bonnie and the kids.

Again, softly, this hardened local John Dillinger wannabe began to weep. DiPaolo waited.

“If I didn’t have all these charges against me, I would never give him up. Never! But I want to see my kids again.”

Now Montevecchio was sobbing.

But DiPaolo still wasn’t having any of it. “I’m waiting,” the detective finally said with deliberately conveyed and obvious impatience. Settling down somewhat, Montevecchio sucked in a deep breath and expelled the name in a single rush of air:

“Anthony! Anthony. He’s the one.”

Believing he actually knew who Caesar was finally fingering, DiPaolo was nonetheless stunned with Montevecchio’s sudden brazen revelation. But just to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, he asked Montevecchio directly: “Anthony who?”

Caesar Montevecchio, now completely wiped out by his confessed betrayal, seemed slightly surprised with the question. “Arnone,” Montevecchio sighed. “Anthony Arnone!”

DiPaolo smiled knowingly. He had been right. He long suspected Arnone, especially with the Mastrey connection and his friendship with Montevecchio.

Anthony Arnone! “Niggsy” to the all those in Erie’s Little Italy neighborhood – and the wise guys and wise guy wannabes beyond the immediate area. The pieces were beginning to click together in DiPaolo’s skull. It was all making so much sense to him now! Arnone owned an Italian import company at West 18th and Cherry Streets, the same building where Montevecchio had visited sometimes daily during various undercover police surveillance operations since Dovishaw was murdered in 1983.

Niggsy’s father, Liborio Arnone, also known throughout the neighborhood as “BoBo,” died several years earlier. The senior Arnone left the importing business to his son Niggsy. Niggsy had been relatively clean, as far as Erie cops knew. Unlike many others who grew up in Erie’s west side Little Italy neighborhood, wise guys or wannabes, Niggsy Arnone’s only previous run-ins with the local law had been with illegal gambling and, as a young man, that 1957 fake robbery at Dee’s Cigar Store. Niggsy had been indicted by the feds in 1974 – along with 22 of his closest friends – for bookmaking, but served only a few years on probation.

Arnone was also known to be addicted to the ponies, as well as the ongoing, prevalent illegal numbers game in Erie. Word on the street had it that Niggsy would bet the $100 window at various tracks for multiple tickets a race. He was known to have frequented Thistledown in nearby Cleveland, Ohio, at least twice a week, while visiting the local Off Track Betting parlor almost every day, sometimes with Caesar, a Commodore Downs employee would later testify. If ever a person was addicted to gambling, it likely was he.

It now made perfect sense to DiPaolo that sooner or later, Niggsy Arnone, despite the income from his father’s importing business, was going to have cash-flow problems. Eventually, DiPaolo thought, Arnone was going to find himself in the same precarious straits as many other compulsive gamblers: He was going to be desperate for more money, extremely desperate.

But Arnone had a history going back many, many years with Dovishaw as well – and that history would inextricably link the two in life, and in Bolo’s death.

To many, it might seem like ancient history. But to Dom DiPaolo, who knew the genesis of every wise guy and wannabe in Erie since the 1940s, the 1957 phony robbery at Dee’s Cigar Store was as fresh in his mind as the day he reviewed the now yellow-tinted official police records so many years ago. Now, as Caesar Montevecchio was fingering Niggsy Arnone as the one who set up the Bolo Dovishaw hit, DiPaolo again recalled that Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw, then only 20, but already with his eye cast toward the easy money of Erie’s dark underworld, hatched his own plan for committing that “perfect” crime. At the time, Bolo thought it was ingenious. And so did Arnone, his longtime, boyhood pal from Little Italy. DiPaolo remembered that an integral part of Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw’s plan to get away with robbing Dee’s Cigar Store called for the co-conspirators to deposit a large chunk of their illegally-gotten booty in a bank safe-deposit box.

It was illustrative of Bolo’s penchant for safe-deposit boxes to hide dirty money, a habit that would eventually and ultimately lead to his violent death. Dom DiPaolo was perceptive enough to figure out that this seemingly small footnote in well-worn newspaper clippings from the 1950s, would 26 years later provide the germ that hatched the conspiracy to kill Dovishaw. The use of bank safe-deposit boxes to stash illegal money would become Dovishaw’s lifetime habit – an M.O. remembered by the man eventually suspected of contracting for Bolo’s murder. Few could know that Dovishaw kept hundreds of thousands of dollars in gambling receipts in safe-deposit boxes. That Bolo Dovishaw kept the keys to those bank safe-deposit boxes concealed on his person was known to even fewer. Niggsy Arnone knew, DiPaolo believed. He was so certain he was prepared to bet his reputation on it. Niggsy Arnone, a central figure in the botched phony robbery years earlier, who would later take over his family’s food-importing business but could not stay out of heavy debt because of his apparent addiction to horse-racing, was one of the few who knew of Dovishaw’s stash.

It must have been so very tempting, DiPaolo thought. Arnone probably knew full well how to get at that stash: The keys. The keys Bolo always carried with him. Even more, DiPaolo believed Anthony “Niggsy” Arnone knew exactly how to obtain the keys to Bolo’s riches. If it was him indeed, Arnone had an “insider” at the bank – Montevecchio said it was “a woman” – who could help him get to and then open Dovishaw’s safe-deposit boxes.

But first things first. First, he had to get the keys. And, DiPaolo speculated, Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw, Arnone also probably knew, would only give them up if he was dead.

Dom DiPaolo, by nature, was not an excitable guy, either on the job or in his private life. Yet with this revelation from Montevecchio, it was difficult for DiPaolo to hide his excitement. Some 30 years after the phony robbery, Caesar Montevecchio was fingering Anthony Arnone as the planner, the arranger of the death of Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw. DiPaolo listened intently as Montevecchio spoke, telling of being approached by Arnone early in 1982.

“Niggsy tells me he’s planning to hit Bolo,” Montevecchio related calmly, in nonchalant tones, as though he was explaining a pastor’s church sermon to an old pal. “He says we can make some really big money.”

Caesar said he asked Arnone, “Yeah? How you going to do that? How you going to kill him? And just where’s the money coming from?”

“What was Arnone’s answer?” DiPaolo asked.

“He said, ‘That pig has over $400,000 in cash in his safe-deposit boxes at the bank. And I got an “in” at the bank. All we do is get the keys, then kill the pig, hide his body to give me time to get in there at the bank, and we’ll hit the fucking jackpot.’”

Montevecchio told DiPaolo that Arnone promised him a percentage of the take for helping set up the killing and key-snatching. As always, trying to downplay his role, Montevecchio swore to DiPaolo he told Arnone, “‘You’re fucking sick, man. You better see a doctor.’”

Arnone, however, was persistent, Montevecchio insisted as he continued to outline how they allegedly planned Dovishaw’s killing. “‘Well?’” Caesar quoted Arnone as asking, “‘What do you think?’” Montevecchio told DiPaolo he conveyed to Arnone that he was still skeptical. But Arnone, unwilling to abandon the idea, plowed forward, Montevecchio told the cop.

“‘Hey, I rented a safe-deposit box at the same bank,’” Arnone revealed to Montevecchio. “‘And whadaya know, it just happens to be right above the pig’s box!’”

Montevecchio quoted Arnone as telling him, “She already helped me out with that one,” apparently in reference to the “woman.”

In life as in death, Bolo didn’t get much respect from his contemporaries. “Pig” was Arnone’s characterization of Dovishaw. But, sadly for Bolo, Arnone wasn’t alone in disdaining Erie’s big-time sports betting bookie.

“That’s when I knew he was serious,” Montevecchio told the cop. “But, y’know, what the hell. It started to seem like a good fucking plan. And who didn’t need the money?”

Several days after that first meeting in 1982, the two met again, Montevecchio said. And once the wheels began to turn, it appeared the course was set and Dovishaw’s destiny fatefully sealed. During that second meeting, Montevecchio continued, Arnone was full of new details for the murder plan. With the help of the “woman” at the bank, he had it worked out in his mind, Montevecchio said. But he needed Montevecchio. And as long as it involved an easy payday, Caesar Montevecchio wasn’t at all bashful in helping carry out the plan.

“‘I’ll give you $10,000 upfront,’” Arnone promised, according to Montevecchio’s recollection of their conversation during that second meeting. “‘And the shooter gets $20,000. You handle it. You find the shooter. And don’t tell me who. I don’t want to know.’”

Before even approaching Montevecchio and presenting the murder plan to him, Arnone knew Caesar would not be the gunman, Caesar told Detective DiPaolo. “That’s why he asked me to find someone else. Niggsy knew I had plenty of connections from the old days. He knew I could come up with someone.” Ironically, DiPaolo knew that to be true as he recalled Montevecchio’s phone call to Giacalone about taking out the cop.

It was almost as though Montevecchio was proud of those connections and his assistance, DiPaolo thought. Even now, facing additional prison time, Caesar’s still proud of his long cesspool of a life.

“Okay, I get it. You weren’t to be the shooter. You were to find the killer,” DiPaolo reiterated somewhat impatiently. He had waited a long time for this. “Then what?”

“We were pulling off a lot of jobs at different joints at the time,” Montevecchio shrugged. “After one of them, I asked Bob if he’d consider a hit for twenty big ones.”

“Bob?” DiPaolo wanted to make sure of the details, in particular that he was getting all the names right.

“Yeah, Bob. Fucking Bob Dorler. Dorler says, ‘Well, yeah. Put the money up front. Sure. Why the fuck not?’”

Montevecchio said he told Robert Dorler he’d have to get back to him later. Then, Caesar went straight to Arnone, Montevecchio said.

“I got someone who needs the money up front,” Montevecchio told Niggsy.

“‘Oh yeah?’” Montevecchio said Arnone replied. “‘Well, fuck him. When it’s done, he gets paid. You know damned well that’s how we do it. If not, get somebody else.’”

And so, the strategic planning began in earnest.