Evening's Empire

by Zachary Lazar

  JUDSON ROBERTS, OCRD JR

  JOSEPH KORETSKI, SID JK

  GEORGE WEISZ, SID GW

  JACK SMITH, U.S. MARSHALL JS

  JR 10 December, 1986, at 10:04 AM. Present are Joe Koretski, Jack Smith, George Weisz, Jud Roberts and Robert Hardin

  (Introductions in background)

  JR We’ll get right to the point. Uh, the reason we want to talk to you is that we’re looking at a murder…

  I thought I knew this part of the story. Then a friend I’d made in Phoenix, a historian named Dave Wagner, sent me an e-mail saying he’d come across a document that might be of interest to me. It was a 214-page transcript of an interview from 1986 with Robert Doug Hardin, one of the hit men who had killed my father.

  It arrived in a brown cardboard box. I wanted to read it fast, right away, but it went on and on, jumping from anecdote to anecdote, a blur of names and boasts, scattered memories of more than ten murders Hardin had committed in Phoenix and Chicago. I read it again from the beginning, this time with a better idea of what was relevant. On the third try, I began to adjust to Hardin’s language, to locate his frame of reference, to recognize the intelligence, so different from my own, that lay beneath his way of speaking. I thought his way of speaking was crucial to what the transcript had to say. I sat down and pared the 214 pages down to the following eight.

  He was twenty years-old when he came up from Alabama, 1964, Robert Doug Hardin—they called him Doug. He was doing house burglaries in Chicago and Doug would take the gold coins and silver dollars and diamonds and sell it to Lee DiFranco, who was with Albert Tocco, he was one of Albert Tocco’s soldiers in Chicago Heights. One day Doug got in an argument with a guy named Jimmy Carver, and Carver had a habit of beating everybody up, so Doug had a little old .32, one of them little things you put in your hand, he found it in a burglary. Carver grabbed ahold of Doug and Doug shot him in the stomach. The first time he ever shot anyone. Old Lee seen it. That’s when they started talking—when Doug would go in the Upstairs Restaurant or the Liberty Restaurant, there’d be Lee and he’d come sit down.

  One night Lee asked him to go for a ride and they just started talking and Lee said he liked him. It just growed like that. Doug got into another run-in with the Los Hombres motorcycle gang in Indiana and the two guys he was doing burglaries with ran and hid. Doug had to go to Lee like a little kid and say could he get him, a, you know, a high powered gun that shoots a lot of times. Lee said what’s the matter and Doug told him. He says come on, I’ll go with you. They shot them son of a bitches plum out of Indiana. And Lee would stand there and laugh as he did things like this. Lee was a different type—Lee was from the old school of that. And Tocco was from the old school.

  Lee was a vicious little bastard, only five foot two, but when he came after you he got what he wanted. Doug saw him plug a guy in a wall one time, took his shoes off, tied a few cords around his throat, then stuck him in the fucking wall, electrocuted him. Went over and stood by the circuit, got a pitcher of water, threw it on the guy, then flipped the switch, knocked the circuit, what did he think about that? That was the cycle of Lee’s mind. He was that vicious, it’s just that Lee kept it low profile. And he did things in spurts. And he walked around with twenty-five, thirty, forty thousand dollars in his pocket all the time so nobody know’d he had anything he wanted.

  They went to Phoenix four or five times a year. Usually they’d go for about a week at a time. Lee’s brother was there, Dominick. Dozens of guys were there. There were the En-glishes, Verives, Frank Pedote, Fred Pedote, Paul Schiro, Old Man Kaiser—they were all there, there was going to be lots of work in those years. Back in Chicago Heights, they were all planning Phoenix. Dominick had a big piece of land, near Prescott, land in Black Canyon near the highway, some land in Sun City. Lots of acres, maybe fifteen hundred acres. Him and a guy named Art Sobel had the real estate office, East-West Realty. Sobel was just an instrument that Dominick needed. There was no respect there. It was a tool, but there was no respect.

  This was what they talked about every morning back in Chicago Heights over breakfast, how they were going to run Phoenix. Who had the politicians, who had the cops. Whether Joe Bonanno was there. Nobody in New York would have Bonanno anymore. He was a dead man in New York. They done run him out of there, didn’t want nothing to do with him, so now he lived down in Tucson. He ran a cheese factory down in Tucson, he ran heroin out of Culiacán, Mexico, but he kept things quiet. The only help he’d get now was maybe out of Palm Springs, unless he had the politicians. That was Lee’s theory. Unless Joe Bonanno had the politicians, Phoenix was wide open. That’s what Lee DiFranco and Albert Tocco were talking about. That they could handle Joe Bonanno. That they were planning Phoenix and this was their opportunity to get it, to have a war with Joe Bonanno.

  They were going to shake the bush and get the lion to jump out. That was how Dominick DiFranco put it.

  Doug did ten or fifteen murders in that time with Lee. He did a hit on Chick Coralsky and Chick was a friend. Doug had got Chick the job of managing the Mantino Hotel and the Mantino Hotel was a little lockdown whorehouse Lee had. It was a motel and it had sixteen rooms and the whores in each room. This was a good business, the place made a quarter of a million dollars a year. Doug and Chick were friends and even though Chick was older, Doug had sat down with Chick like a father to a son. Doug sat him down and said Chick no matter what you do, don’t steal, don’t break any of the rules, don’t you let any of those girls crawl across the state line. They’ll bust the joint and they’ll confiscate it. Doug said, Chick if you break those rules, they’ll kill you for it. Chick said, I give you my word kid. I’ll treat it like if it was yours. Instead, he broke every rule. Damn phone bill a hundred and five dollars, girls was calling Florida, Indiana, Kentucky. They had a girl over there fifteen years old working in a whorehouse lockdown. Even though they were paying the Sheriff, what if the G had a went down there? And that was just the way it was told to Doug. Damn if Lee DiFranco didn’t come and start screaming at Doug. Doug had gave Lee his word. If anything happened, if Chick broke any rules, Doug was responsible. So Lee called and said hit that mother-fucker. He was holding Doug to what their deal was. So Doug went to Chick and asked Chick did you do this? He gave him that chance. And Chick said hey fuck it, it don’t mean nothing. So Doug figured if he took that attitude, asshole, if this prick would do this, he was a danger. Your mind had to tell you what you learned in the past. So Doug was going to grab Chick and take him to Lee, but what happened is they caught him by accident riding a horse on a Saturday afternoon. He was riding an Appaloosa horse that he had borrowed from a doctor and they just pulled up beside him and shot him off the horse with a carbine on a Saturday afternoon. That was the end of Chick Coralsky. Doug went to his wake and they were burying him without a tie and a shirt. Doug bought him a shirt and tie and made the undertaker put it on. He liked Chick as a person. It’s just that Chick was on the wrong cycle. And at one point, Lee was like a father to Doug, and Lee said, come on, we got a piece of work to do.

  Lee got the whorehouse in Apache Junction, outside Phoenix. The guy that was running it was an old white headed guy, curly hair, ugly old boy. Big old boy and they were skimming. And then Jackie Dowl and Johnny O. came to town. Lee wanted to burn down their joints, wanted to muscle them out. They had a joint outside Phoenix that had waterbeds in it and Doug and Lee fired it up. They fired up Johnny O. back in Chicago on the Indiana/Illinois border. Johnny O. had a big whorehouse—go go joint, supper club—between Dower, Indiana, and Salt Village. Doug and Lee fired it up, burned it down but then Johnny O. brought his operations to Phoenix. Albert Tocco sent them there to Phoenix, so Lee had to let it slide. Albert Tocco was Lee’s partner in Chicago. What he made out there, Albert got half of. The white headed guy that ran the whorehouse for Lee ran the whorehouse for Albert Tocco. Old Man Kaiser overseen it all. The white headed guy ran the day to day but Kaiser kept an eye on it. He kept an eye on Lee. Old Man Kaiser was a meat cut
ter. He worked in a supermarket, he was cutting meat in the back. He lived in a little house with a fenced in yard, labrador dogs. The FBI busted in his home and confiscated the guns and locked him up and he was fighting em in the courts claiming he had em for the right of hunting and they were saying you’re a convicted felon. Kaiser had a prostitution ring he set up with a lawyer. Seemed like every lawyer and businessman in that state had something to do with prostitution.

  There wasn’t a whorehouse within fifty miles of Phoenix that Doug and Lee didn’t go out and take a look at. Lee had em all wrote down in a book, he was finding out who ran em. In other words, they were shaking them down, there were at least sixty whorehouses in Maricopa County. Some of them was hotels, some of them was buildings, some of them was lounges. There was about six guys who had women there that they took to certain hotels, maybe the clerk would call them up. These were high-class call girls for businessmen. The idea was for Lee to come in and muscle the whole operation. Lee and Albert Tocco were going to take over Phoenix and their whole focus at first was gambling and prostitution. And Dominick had the land. Dominick had thirteen hundred acres just in Yavapai County, he and that land business were worth a million dollars. He had a bank safe in his bedroom: barrel door, you had to twist it, combination it, twist it and turn the lock and then pull it out and a barrel came out and you had to use a key to get by the gate inside it. They had ten or so of Leonardo Nearman’s pictures. There was a set of these gold spoons and forks, twenty-two carat gold that a king used. Had jewels in the ends of em. Stuff like that just flew around in those circles. So there was a business in stolen goods and some of it went through Dominick DiFranco and some of it went through Old Man Kaiser and some of it went through Spilotro.

  They were gonna build a restaurant out in Phoenix, then they dropped that theory. Then Dominick was gonna go into construction real big, he had construction businesses in Chicago, Joliet, but the best way Dominick could wash a lot of money was in real estate, so he bought a lot of land, he started the office with Sobel. Then he and Sobel somehow muscled the water rights for some land in Sun City. The rights belonged to a law firm, the DiContis. DiContis had an office on Central Avenue, across from the country club. They had the water rights and Dominick just stole them, he got them down on paper, they were worth half a million dollars. He was acting just like a muscle, he just muscled in on the water rights and now he was trying to sell them back to DiContis for half a million. Doug would come in with Lee by Old Man Kaiser’s house or by Dominick’s house and he would eat something, he would listen to them talk, and that was how he first heard about the Canadian. The Canadian was a real estater, he was the front man for the DiContis. He brought the money over in a briefcase one day, Lee said, half a million dollars of DiContis’ money. Doug didn’t see it, but Lee said the Canadian came by with a briefcase and that he had got the money from DiConti’s law office. They were supposed to give up the water rights then, but they didn’t give them. And the reason they didn’t give them was it was really Joe Bonanno’s money. That was Lee’s theory. Lee said DiConti was the fucking fall guy for Joe Bonanno—everyone knew DiConti was Bonanno’s lawyer—and Bonanno ain’t got no business over in Phoenix. Phoenix was wide open, he didn’t have no right down there. Lee was going back to Chicago, Tocco’s telling him we’re gonna go partners out there, this is gonna happen. So Lee was telling Dominick don’t worry about it. Lee DiFranco and Albert Tocco could handle Joe Bonanno. It was just that simple. This was everyone sitting in the den, Dominick sitting there in his undershirt smoking a cigarette and Lee’s sitting there hounding him, telling him, beating his fingers on the table telling him what’s going on and Dominick listening and thinking is it happening that way?

  Dominick said maybe they should back off and give back the money, just take a percentage. Lee went through the roof. He’s not giving the money back—fuck DiConti, fuck Bonanno, fuck everybody. Lee hated the real estate guys. He hated Sobel, he hated the Canadian. The minute the Canadian brought the money in that suitcase Lee wanted to kill him. By the rule, you were supposed to. That was the way they all functioned, that was the way they all operated. The real estate guy, the Canadian, was threatening, he was telling him he was gonna go to the police, and Lee wanted him killed. He wanted everybody killed. Dominick says, okay, we’re gonna shake the bush and get the lion to jump out.

  So that February, Old Man Kaiser called the Canadian up and set up this meeting at the country club. The Canadian was an older gentleman, very polite, just said his piece and nothing more. He was a big guy with a high-hairline, maybe in his sixties. It turned into a real voiceful conversation, lots of shouting, and Doug backed Lee off, said it’s a public place, there’s people around, let the guy go.

  Lee killed him the next time they met. He choked him right in the back of Dominick’s Cadillac. They had driven back to Phoenix just a few days before. They brought three .22 pistols with holes drilled in the barrels. They hid it all behind Dominick’s house—Doug didn’t even know they were in the car until they got there to Phoenix. They hit the Canadian and then they hit another guy in a garage, three days later, another real estater. He worked in the same building as DiContis, worked for the DiContis’ law office. Worked for Joe Bonanno. Seemed like this guy in the garage done something to Dominick DiFranco or somebody that was affiliated with Dominick DiFranco. This was right after they hit the Canadian. They buried the Canadian out in the desert in a dry creekbed and no one ever found him. Doug never even knew his name. This other guy in the garage was all over the newspapers. His name was Ed Lazar.

  There is no mention of Ned Warren’s name in Doug Hardin’s 214-page transcript. Of course, Hardin would not have been told Warren’s name in any case. Lee said, come on, we got a piece of work to do. I don’t think either of them knew who Ed Lazar was or why they were there to kill him.

  16

  Arizona Republic, June 6, 1974:

  State Probes Realty Chief; Bribe Claimed

  Allegations that monthly cash payments were collected from at least six land development firms and turned over to J. Fred Talley, Arizona real estate commissioner, are being investigated by the state attorney general’s office, an official disclosed Wednesday.

  Ronald L. Crismon, chief of the attorney general’s Strike Force on Organized Crime, said that the payments reportedly funneled to Talley were “part of the allegations brought to my attention and which we are investigating.”

  The 70-year-old Talley said he knew nothing about an investigation and denied any wrongdoing. He has been real estate commissioner for about 14 years and is an attorney and former Graham County school teacher.

  Other sources revealed that the investigation stems from allegations made to Phoenix police and others that ex-convict Ned Warren, once known as Nathan Waxman and an Arizona land promoter, collected the monthly cash payments and allegedly delivered them to Talley….

  The original allegations were made last Aug. 30 to Phoenix police by James Cornwall, 38, former president of Great Southwest Land and Cattle Co. of Phoenix.

  Cornwall, who now lives in Virginia, is under a Maricopa County grand jury indictment in connection with the financial collapse two years ago of Great Southwest. Court records show he is charged with 66 counts of fraud. He is now reported to be pastor of a non-denominational Church in Virginia.

  Warren, reached at his valley home, declined to comment or even listen to the allegations made against him by Cornwall.

  “I don’t want to discuss it,” he told a reporter….

  Cornwall asserted that the monthly payments to Warren by Great Southwest were a minimum of $100. Occasionally “heat” payments of as much as $500 in Great Southwest funds were made for “problems which required extra work on the part of Talley,” Cornwall is quoted in police reports.

  At least five other land development companies made similar payments to Warren allegedly for Talley, Cornwall told police.

  Cornwall said he made the same allegations “about two month
s ago” to other authorities, including the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

  Cornwall added that he had only two contacts with Talley, “both through Ned Warren.” However, Cornwall said, he had “no personal rapport with him (Talley).”

  Although he is unable to substantiate fully Warren’s alleged claim that the money collected went to Talley, Cornwall said he is convinced it did.

  Cornwall told a reporter he doubts that Warren kept the payments “because I can’t see him (Warren) taking hundreds (of dollars). Warren is a very egotistical guy and if, in fact, he could pass money to Talley from other people without it having to come out of his pocket and still be a hero, I can see him doing it. That’s why it is believable to me.”

  Other payments from his company, Cornwall maintained, went to a “guy in the county attorney’s office.”

  “Warren told me,” Cornwall continued, “Hey, this is something—that all the land companies do. He told me ‘all the companies I work with.’ ”

  Cornwall said that when he purchased Great Southwest in 1970 he found that the company had entered into certain agreements through which the firm was obligated to pay Warren a $500-a-week consulting fee, although Warren did no consulting work.

  At one point, as the Great Southwest financial situation worsened, Cornwall told police, he stopped making the weekly consulting payments to Warren for “a couple of weeks.”

  “All of a sudden,” Cornwall told the police, “we had lots of complaints from the Real Estate Department.” So the weekly consulting payments were resumed, Cornwall added.

  Cornwall told police that Warren, in effect, controlled Great Southwest while Cornwall was its president….