CHAPTER 37

NOW IT WAS TIME FOR THERESA MASTREY’S 15 MINUTES OF FAME. And, it was also time for Dominick DiPaolo to marvel again at the stranger-than-fiction aspect of the world of criminal justice. Especially in the “big small” town of Erie, Pennsylvania, where no aspect of a cop’s life ever could be taken for granted.

The Dovishaw murder investigation, with all the characters who inhabited it, was proving to be no exception to the weird rule. Mastrey, angered that her name had surfaced prominently during the preliminary hearing for Anthony “Niggsy” Arnone several days earlier, held a press conference in the office of her lawyer, Joseph J. D’Alba.

It was August 3, 1989, another typical summer day in Erie. Mastrey, according to another story in the Morning News, was claiming that prosecutors unfairly harmed her reputation and good name within the Erie community. D’Alba appeared to be comfortable on his own safe turf, DiPaolo thought. Not only did D’Alba point out that his client fully cooperated with police in the Dovishaw probe, but also that Mastrey was never charged with a crime.

“What the government has done to Mrs. Mastrey is both unique and unfair,” Attorney D’Alba proclaimed in the newspaper account.

D’Alba, according to the newspaper story, claimed that by linking Mastrey’s name to the murder investigation, prosecutors had placed his client in a bad light. He said she must now vindicate herself, even though she had done nothing wrong, nor had she been charged with any kind of a crime. It had been DiPaolo who linked Mastrey’s name to the murder case based on information from Caesar Montevecchio about the “her” mentioned by accused murder arranger Niggsy Arnone. It was DiPaolo who testified that bank records showed Arnone last had entered his own safe deposit box on January 4, 1983, the day after the gangland-style killing and the same day Dovishaw’s lifeless body was discovered in the basement of his west side Erie home.

As for the $60,000 in cash DiPaolo had testified he discovered in Mastrey’s own personal safe deposit boxes, the ex-bank official told the news media that the amount was not anywhere near that sum.

“If someone invested that money I’d like them to invest the rest of my money. It’s really grown since they’ve taken it,” she is quoted as saying with no small degree of sarcasm. Still, Mastrey would not say exactly how much money police found.

For his part, when DiPaolo was contacted by reporters, he refused to be drawn into the Mastrey controversy, a good move for a wise cop who knows when not to try his case in the local media. All he would say is that his investigation was continuing and he would not comment. He knew a public debate over the issue would serve no purpose.

During her press conference, Mastrey did not deny that she might have been the person who opened a safe deposit box account for Arnone, her first cousin, at her bank.

According to the newspaper story, Mastrey acknowledged that as a bank officer she was able to issue safe deposit boxes, but didn’t know if she handled Arnone’s request for a box. She maintained that she cooperated with police since the start of the probe, underwent much questioning, and even testified before two grand juries.

D’Alba, meanwhile, told the media Mastrey voluntarily submitted to questioning by police five times, and that that her grand jury testimony was without immunity.

D’Alba told the media his client accounted for all of her personal finances and that he believed police investigators were satisfied with her openness. He also revealed that Mastrey had undergone a lie detector test with passing results that should have easily cleared her beyond suspicion. But the lawyer wasn’t finished. “What more can she do?” D’Alba asked the media. “The government is trying to fulfill the story that Caesar Montevecchio is trying to convey to the public, and to do that they must speculate about other people.”

Montevecchio, D’Alba said at the press conference, has yet to have his version of the murder corroborated by anyone. In her opinion, Mastrey told the Morning News, the government’s case was a lie. Yet Montevecchio had never said it was Mastrey who was involved, just that someone Arnone referred to as “her,” according to what Montevecchio told authorities.

Mastrey said she was angry and weary of being a victim. But Theresa Mastrey wasn’t done yet. Within a month, she’d again be making tons of noise in the media. Whether that would be good or bad for the murder investigation, DiPaolo could not be certain.

“Arnone witness sues PennBank to regain job.” The Erie Daily Times headline on September 6, 1989 screamed for attention. And attention is what it got; for Theresa Mastrey wasn’t yet done with her new-found fame!

With Detective Sergeant Dominick DiPaolo busily helping the prosecution prepare for multiple criminal trials in the 1983 murder of Erie bookie “Ash Wednesday” Dovishaw, such headlines and stories were becoming distractions.

Mastrey, also known as Theresa A. Mastrostefano, had filed a major lawsuit suit in Erie County Court seeking monetary damages from the bank that employed her for many years, and reinstatement to her management position. The bank had suspended her without pay since the previous January and now she wanted past due salary and her job back. Mastrey had been an assistant manager at the Millcreek branch of PennBank, the newspaper story explained. She was responsible for supervising the safe deposit box area where murder victim “Bolo” Dovishaw kept money from his illegal gambling business. Mastrey’s cousin, Niggsy Arnone, had also opened a safe deposit box there, and it was situated in close proximity to Dovishaw’s boxes.

Theresa Mastrey alleged in her lawsuit that she had complied with all subpoenas to testify before state grand juries and cooperated fully with the investigating authorities. She also reiterated in the suit that she had not been accused of any wrongdoing. According to the court filing, Mastrey began working for Security Peoples Trust Company, which later became PennBank, in 1956. It was a much simpler time, then, when Erie’s banks were home-owned and managed. It was before mergers and acquisitions gobbled up or snuffed out smaller financial institutions in favor of the regional and national giants. It was a time before computers, when banking was more personalized, and, in Erie, when bankers knew their customers by their first names, as well as the names of family members and friends.

The lawsuit said Mrs. Mastrey was promoted by the bank several times over the years until she eventually became an assistant branch manager. But when the Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw murder investigation became linked with the bank and its safe deposit boxes, Theresa Mastrey’s professional life rapidly went south, the suit indicated. First, Mastrey was required to take a leave of absence with pay from the bank. That occurred on September 4, 1987, after police searched her safe deposit box and after her first appearance before the state grand jury. Then, in December 1987 and January 1988, the suit said, Mastrey was notified by bank officials that she was suspended indefinitely and without pay because of the duration of the probe.

In the suit, it was alleged bank officials indicated she would receive back pay for the time she missed once she was called back to work. Yet, despite several requests for reinstatement, the suit said, the bank refused.

According to the suit, Mrs. Mastrey was not either accused or charged with wrongdoing connected to the murder probe. The suit went on to say the employment termination was a “wrongful discharge” and punished Mastrey for answering a legal summons to testify before the grand jury.

All of this was reported in the Erie Daily Times story, as well as Mastrey’s demands for damages, for alleged misrepresentations that she would be reinstated and for the treatment of this loyal 25-year bank employee. The suit also claimed the usual maladies, including loss of income, loss of management position, loss of pension and other benefits, loss of professional reputation and humiliation, and mental suffering.

It was DiPaolo’s opinion that as far back as 1982, had Mastrey refused to listen to her cousin Niggsy’s plan to get into Bolo Dovishaw’s safe deposit boxes – had she told him “No!” – then Bolo would still be alive and Mastrey would still be an official at the local bank branch. No, DiPaolo believed, and opined all along, Mastrey only had herself to blame for allegedly going along with the conspiracy in the first place.

As DiPaolo’s opinion went: Without a bank connection, Bolo would be still breathing. Bolo would not have been killed unless someone could get into his boxes; just having Bolo dead would benefit only Ferritto, who would take over sole ownership of the book; where would the plotter get the $20,000 to pay the actual killer, if not from the boxes? The entire plot could not have been pulled off without a bank insider. And finally, the plotter could trust only a close relative at the bank, no other employee. This was DiPaolo’s thinking and opinion. During Mastrey’s first meeting with DiPaolo and Gunter at the bank after the murder, she volunteered information without being questioned, saying things like, “Bolo was a big mouth, bragging to the tellers about his money in his boxes. If I pick-up some info, I will call you.” DiPaolo thought she was setting herself up as a helpful bank employee, but in a way, he later believed, she was actually giving cops the motive for the killing.

As if a harbinger predicting what would soon come, a short time after Theresa Mastrey’s grand jury appearance near Pittsburgh, an Erie man kidnapped his girlfriend, holding her and police at bay for several hours. Police officers on the scene eventually talked the man out of the building. The man released his girlfriend unharmed, and then gave up to officers. In time, the man – a lawyer – had his law license suspended and was ultimately sentenced to prison. It was Jay D’Alba – Mastrey’s attorney. D’Alba, after being released from prison sometime later, was able to get his law license reinstated, but again he his judgment apparently lapsed. In 2008 he was convicted for indirect criminal contempt stemming from a violation of a protection from abuse order that a woman had filed against him. In 2012, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered another law license suspension, this time for one year.

But now, DiPaolo couldn’t be distracted by Theresa Mastrey’s woes. He had a murder case to prepare – and win. And first up was the ice-blooded Ohio hit man who shot Bolo Dovishaw in the back of his head as the bookie begged for his life, Robert Dorler.

In just two months, Dorler’s trial would begin with state prosecutors seeking the ultimate punishment – death by electric chair at central Pennsylvania’s Rockview penitentiary.

Partners in murder. Dealers in death.

Strong words. Even for a prosecutor. Robert E. Dorler was a central figure in such a partnership and dealership, Deputy Pennsylvania Attorney General M.L. Ebert told an Erie County criminal court jury on Friday, November 14, 1989, the long-awaited opening day of Dorler’s capital offense murder trial.

Ebert began by saying he actually had no direct evidence to link Dorler, 53, of Medina, Ohio, with the January 3, 1983 killing of Erie’s Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw. But Ebert insisted that the information put together by investigators over the past nearly seven years – including Dorler’s own incriminating statements – would be enough to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and send him to Pennsylvania’s electric chair.

“When you hear those words, you’re going to know that Mr. Dorler knew about this case, that Mr. Dorler participated in the crime and that Mr. Dorler was a partner in murder,” Ebert told the Erie County jury. At the start of the two-week trial, the state prosecutor told jurors in Erie County Judge George Levin’s courtroom that the evidence against Dorler would be so overwhelming they must convict him of first degree murder.

However, the Erie Daily Times reported that day in its afternoon editions that defense attorney John H. Moore would use Ebert’s own witnesses to acquit his client.

In Moore’s opening statement to the jury the defense attorney said he would attack the credibility of key prosecution witnesses, many of them career criminals themselves. Moore said he’d show that these criminal witnesses were ratting against Dorler out of vengeance and to help themselves get reduced sentences on a wide array of felony charges they themselves faced.

“I ask you above all, when any witness testifies, to ask yourself if that witness has anything to gain by coming into this courtroom,” Moore said to the jury of eight women and four men.

Moore was not a typical well-coifed courtroom criminal defense lawyer. He differed in appearance from many of the slick, more wellknown and sharper-dressed criminal defense attorneys in town. Tall and bespectacled, he was overweight and frumpy-appearing, often with ill-fitting clothes. Sort of like a modern-day image of Clarence Darrow. His appearance belied a sharp, clear defense-attorney’s mind, and also hid vast previous experience as a criminal prosecutor himself. While DiPaolo had faith that Ebert’s prosecutorial abilities would not betray DiPaolo’s long, tenacious murder investigation, the cop still knew that Moore’s defense ability mustn’t be taken lightly.

Under Pennsylvania law, the trial phase must be followed by a penalty phase should there be a first degree murder conviction. It means that upon conviction, a separate proceeding must immediately follow during which the jury would consider other evidence – “aggravating” and “mitigating” – before determining whether the penalty is death or life in prison.

Judge Levin, a former trial lawyer, was an experienced, if sometimes unorthodox jurist, who appeared to look at different ways of interpreting the law. During a murder case a decade earlier, for example, he believed that a morgue photo of a female stabbing victim was too graphically inflammatory and emotion-producing for the jury to view in its entirety. While the defense and prosecution fought over admission of the photo of the victim sprawled on a slab in the morgue, Levin directed the courtroom tipstaff to produce a pair of scissors before he neatly and surgically removed the women’s head from the photo, allowing only the image of the stab wounds to her upper torso to be admitted into evidence. With neither side particularly pleased with the ruling, neither objected. Both sides believed it was a fair, if not unusual, solution. (The District Attorney at the time, Robert Chase, later walked around the courthouse for weeks after the trial proudly displaying to employees the severed head portion of the photo.)

But now Judge Levin was presiding over his first truly mob-related case. With all the media attention, his judgment in the Dorler murder trial would have to rival that of the legendary Solomon.

In his opening remarks to the jury, Prosecutor Ebert strung together the facts, in his eyes, of what was to be the state’s compelling case against Dorler. Ebert told jury members they would ultimately learn about the slimiest side of Erie’s underbelly, along with influence and assistance of Ohio mobsters who would do anything for a buck. Even murder. Especially murder. The prosecutor promised the jury members he would prove that the evil Robert Dorler, along with longtime Erie crime figure Caesar Montevecchio, Erie businessman Anthony “Niggsy” Arnone and Ohio criminal William Bourjaily, were all members of the same conspiracy that carefully planned, then carried out Dovishaw’s murder. He was already cautioning the jury that many of the witnesses would not be pretty, but probably offensive to most honest, law-abiding folks.

“I’m going to tell you right now, I’m not overly proud of some of the people the Commonwealth is going to call in this case,” Ebert declared right off. Saying that those in the know about murder conspiracies are often as not criminals themselves, “Contract killings don’t take place in front of school teachers.”

Ebert was trying to set up the panel to not only accept, but also to believe Caesar Montevecchio and his testimony. All involved knew this case hinged on Montevecchio’s credibility with the jury, and while Ebert wasn’t about to convince anyone that Caesar was still a choirboy, the prosecutor did need to plant the seeds of Montevecchio’s credibility early on in the minds of skeptical trial jurors.

Defense attorney John Moore was having none of Ebert’s platitudes toward Montevecchio. And Moore especially wasn’t about to allow Ebert’s words to the jury to pass unchallenged. Moore, in his opening remarks, pointed out that although Caesar Montevecchio and Billy Bourjaily pleaded guilty to criminal charges several months earlier, neither of them had as yet been sentenced. The comment was meant to raise the jurors’ suspicions and create doubt. The defense attorney assured the jury that both men had been promised they would be handed either minimum prison sentences or time to be served concurrently with prison terms they were already currently serving. “In other words,” Moore said, “Caesar Montevecchio would not serve another day for the murder of ‘Bolo’ Dovishaw. In other words, Caesar Montevecchio was given a free ride.”

In yet another bizarre twist to an already bizarre tale, Moore told the jury he would demonstrate during the trial that Montevecchio, in wiretapped conversations several years earlier with government witness “Fat Sam” Esper, freely acknowledged that it was he who had killed Bolo Dovishaw at the behest of Pittsburgh’s Frantino crime family. The reason the Frantino family wanted Dovishaw wasted, Moore skillfully argued, was because the Pittsburgh mobsters wished to take over ‘Bolo’ Dovishaw’s lucrative Erie gambling business.

Moore’s attempt was to demonstrate to the jury vengeance, that Montevecchio and Bourjaily turned on Dorler in the Dovishaw probe because Dorler had gone before a grand jury, and also because Montevecchio and Bourjaily were trying to get lighter sentences for themselves.

Confusing and slightly twisting the facts even more, which good defense lawyers have an uncanny knack for doing, Moore related to the jury that Montevecchio, in an earlier statement to Federal Bureau of Investigation, also implicated Joseph Scutella as the man who ordered the slaying, with the two Ohio men getting the twenty grand for the hit. “We will prove that the Commonwealth’s case was put together solely to justify the plea bargains with Caesar Montevecchio and William Bourjaily,” Moore concluded.

The opening statements were widely reported in the Erie media, and jurors must have found them to be mind-numbing as they were delivered by skilled lawyers on both sides of the courtroom. But now the time had come for the lawyers’ spinning their cases to cease, and the actual testimony of the witnesses to begin.

Prosecutor Ebert began cautiously on that first day of Dorler’s murder trial, slowly building his case with credible witnesses. It had been a long-proven prosecutorial technique that first, you had to ascertain that yes, Virginia, a crime had been committed. Once the jurors were convinced of the actual authenticity of wrongdoing, the prosecutor could feel more comfortable going for the jugular.

Testifying on that first day were those who could beyond the shadow of a doubt convince the jury that Bolo Dovishaw died not from natural causes, not from old age, not accidentally, not from his own hand, but as the direct result of the conspiracy and foul play of others

First was former Erie Police Detective Sergeant Joseph Weindorf, who had been the first investigator on the scene, even before Dom DiPaolo got the assignment the morning after Bolo’s murder was discovered. Weindorf, who later became Erie’s public safety director for a short period, and then the controversial Erie County Director of Public Safety, was a college-educated cop who had the respect of other officers and those operating within the area’s criminal justice system. He told the jury the Erie Police Detective Division received a telephone call shortly before 8 p.m. the night of January 4, 1983. The call was from a former Detective Sergeant, Frank Rotunda, who told his colleagues on duty that night about a possible homicide. (Many were aware by that time of how Rotunda was led to find Dovishaw’s body by the elite of Erie’s criminal underworld. But that’s getting way ahead of events as they were presented by state prosecutor Ebert that day to the jury in Judge Levin’s courtroom.) As a result of Rotunda’ call, Weindorf told the jury, he was dispatched to Dovishaw’s West 21st Street home.

The former Erie Daily Times newspaper reported on the testimony, saying that Weindorf was let into the house by Rotunda (later to serve a prison sentence for murder solicitation in a drug case). Present in “Ash Wednesday’s” house were admitted mob killer Ferritto, “Cy” Ciotti, Torrelli and Dovishaw’s estranged wife, Joan. Weindorf said he recognized the three men from past experience, telling Rotunda to keep them at the house. Weindorf testified Rotunda said there could possibly be a body in the basement. Weindorf did in fact find Dovishaw’s corpse in the basement, saying it was covered by a sheet and a rug. Weindorf also told the jury that during his initial investigation he learned Dovishaw’s car, later discovered in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn South along Interstate 90, was then missing.

Next to take the witness stand was Dr. Halbert Fillinger, a Philadelphia region forensic pathologist affectionately known in law enforcement circles as “Homicide Hal.” In those pre-CSI days, Fillinger was as close as Erie County law enforcement would get to a real-life scientific crime scene investigator. Many of the autopsies performed on Erie County murder victims were the work of general hospital pathologists who picked up extra money for their post-mortem work. Fillinger had been an assistant medical examiner in Philadelphia County, and, at the time of his testimony he was chief deputy coroner for Bucks County. Now accepted as an expert witness in the Dovishaw case, he testified that he had inspected the crime scene and performed an autopsy on Dovishaw’s body on January 5, 1983. According to Fillinger’s often graphic courtroom testimony, Dovishaw died from a gunshot wound to the right rear portion of his head. The physician said that based on crime scene observations, it was likely Dovishaw died where he was found, probably in a kneeling position when fatally shot, with hands and feet bound.

“Homicide Hal” told the jury the victim also had been stabbed in the corner of his left eye. But because of damage from the bullet, Fillinger could not determine whether the stabbing occurred prior to or following the gunshot. Furthermore, Fillinger said the pool of blood found near Dovishaw’s body suggested that Dovishaw was alive when he was shot, and likely lived for perhaps a half-hour after the shooting.

With Thanksgiving only several weeks away, and Judge Levin wanting this trial over by then, the first day of testimony concluded late that Friday afternoon. But Monday morning, following a relatively peaceful weekend, would bring even more explosive revelations.