Born to Lose

by James G. Hollock

  He sees we ain’t foolin’ and suddenly looks more sober than he’s likely been for a week. Punch stares at me with his rheumy eyes, then blurts out, “Yeah, Floyd, that was Stanley. I knowed him some years back an’ he’d come up here now ’n’ then … ya know, shoot the bull, maybe set trap lines. We was always okay with each other. By the radio I know Stanley got hisself in a real pinch this time, an’ I was surprised when he showed up like he did with that girl.”

  “And where is that girl?” I says to Punch.

  Punch replies, “In your hurry you didn’t notice the car parked in the trees to your left as ya pulled up. She got in the car with her baby and drives off.”

  I was surprised and said, “You mean she had a baby with her?”

  Punch answered, “Yep, barely born, two months old, called Michael.”

  Cliff puts in, “Punch, did you get her name?”

  Punch looks up in the air and squints his eyes, like he’s thinkin’ hard, still wonderin’ how much he should tell the fuzz, but finally he says, “Well, Stanley kept callin’ her Joe, but once’t he called her Jodine, so I guess that’s it. Didn’t get no last name.”

  More men are comin’ in, so me an’ Cliff head over toward Newton and Jennings to get everyone into details. Punch calls after us. He’s standin’ on the ten or so boards that serve as his porch, swayin’ a bit till he leans against a rail, then, in a moment of goodness, I reckin’, he says, “Floyd, Cliff, watch it … Hoss said he won’t go back easy.”

  The search lasted till nightfall, then continued the next day, but everything amounted to nothing. Quoted in the Valley News Dispatch, Chief Floyd Mason explained there are so many coal mines in Fawn Township, Hoss could be in any shaft or tunnel. It was also reported that police did not know if Hoss was armed.

  He was armed. A gun taken during the March 27 morning robbery of Nancy Falconer, a .22 Higgins, was loaded and kept in his shirt.

  After the second day, the search was called off. In the several days following, there seemed to be a lull. There were no sightings, no tips, no word at all. Hoss’s victims were on edge. The Falconers were uneasy behind their newly installed security system. Kathy Defino was so shaken as to be barely functioning. The small-town cops up and down the Allegheny Valley remained vigilant. Diane Hoss wished for her husband’s capture, while Jodine, Hoss’s mistress (for she’d been tracked down), longed for a secret visit, and all the while Stanley Hoss, whereabouts unknown, moved inexorably toward measureless calamity.

  6

  Founded a century earlier by landowner James Verner, the little town of Verona had been settled by a good number of immigrants along a big bend in the Allegheny River a dozen miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Although most of its inhabitants assimilated into the general American culture, the town always retained vestiges of the ways and customs of old Europe. In a small grassy area just outside town, a war memorial of stone and bronze offers “Sincere Tribute to the Living and Dead of Verona, Pennsylvania, Whose Valiant Efforts and Selfless Sacrifices Have Made America Great.” Although the original immigrants became fewer and fewer in the decades following World War I, the town stayed much the same, for the descendants of those settlers kept up the family home or bought a house just the street over.

  Verona sits beside its sister community, Oakmont. While they’re called the twin boroughs, they’re opposite twins, to be sure. Oakmont boasts considerable wealth; it is home to many executives and managers of Pittsburgh’s power corporations—U.S. Steel, Koppers, PPG, Westinghouse, Gulf Oil, and the like. Its country club occasionally hosts the U.S. Open. By contrast, Verona is decidedly blue collar, most of the men there laboring at steel plants or iron works. Offering financial counsel, an Oakmont resident might say, “Never touch your principal,” while a man from Verona would venture, “Always keep twenty bucks in your checkbook.” Verona residents fondly remember Sunday gatherings, Eagles and VFW socials, rag-tag holiday parades down Main Street, and having the same paperboy for years, until a younger brother took over. One young woman, the daughter of one of the town’s teachers, said it best: “I grew up happily in Verona, literally without a care in the world. You knew where you belonged and you knew who you belonged to.”

  Verona had a six-man police force. Carmen “Blackie” DeLellis was chief. Blackie had quit school at seventeen to work in a mill, but found himself a year later in General Patton’s 3rd Army 37th Infantry. After the war, Blackie returned to the mill, his job guaranteed like that of other returning vets. In 1955, he left the mill to become a cop, serving five years as a patrolman and four more as lieutenant before becoming chief in 1964. Another army vet, Milt Remmick, was the lieutenant. The patrolmen were the Maroney brothers, Michael and Jimmy, and Kenneth Eichledinger, each in his thirties, plus young Joe Zanella. They all shared Verona’s one police car.

  Joe Zanella, the youngest and most recent addition to the force, had that rare personality that drew young and old alike. Outgoing and cheerful, Joe knew no strangers. Zanellas had lived in western Pennsylvania since 1900. Austrian and Italian by descent, Joe’s parents had raised their five children in a “two-story wood frame, like everyone else’s,” close by the river in Verona. Joe was the second child and only boy; it was Joe who was the apple of everyone’s eye in the family. Growing up, he was a favorite in the neighborhood as well. Schoolmates called him Joe, but family, friends, and neighbors always called him Sonny.

  Joe had busied himself with one job after another from a young age. “Even with that paper route, his first job I think,” said his older sister Barbara, “Sonny always had a half dozen kids tagging along. He’d joke, tell stories, toss a football, or organize quick pickup games with the kids. After Sonny became a policeman in Verona, I’d sometimes see him talking with the teens. A lot of the other cops would come down hard on the young people if they’d see them loafing on the streets. Sonny had a knack with these kids, and he’d never talk down to them. He was a natural with his easy conversation. This was a gift he had.”

  Graduating from his paper route, Joe Zanella began working at a gas station at age fourteen, but even then his goal—indeed, his dream—was to be a cop. Chief Blackie DeLellis well remembered the teenaged Joe hanging around the stationhouse to learn what he could, and staying longer if he could listen to some shop talk. “That kid was a gem, really,” the chief said. “I just hoped we’d have a spot for him when he was ready, and, after Joe’s stint in the army, that’s exactly what happened. In April of ’67, I myself handed him his service revolver and badge. In his dark blue police uniform, our newest addition couldn’t keep a grin off his face. He was awfully happy.”

  After a year on the job, Officer Joe Zanella was well settled in and busy as ever. He was in the army reserves and was a volunteer fireman. Joe had married an attractive brunette, Mary Ella Langus, and the couple had just celebrated their third wedding anniversary. They had their first child, Charles, in 1967 and their second, Michelle, in June 1969. As they saved to buy their own house, Joe and Mary Ella lived in a second-floor apartment at 477 Center Avenue in Verona. They made for a popular couple; no one in their circle had a lot of money, but the Zanellas entertained modestly and were often invited out.

  In addition to friendships with officers in his own station, Joe had a fine friendship with a pair of cops in Oakmont, Bob Fescemyer and Dick Zoller. The three were nearly the same age and had grown up together. “When Joe and I were kids,” Fescemyer said,

  we lived in the Sylvan area of Verona. This is on the lower side of town, near the Allegheny. This little neighborhood was made up of lower-class working folks. We called ourselves the “Sylvan rats.” We were poor but we didn’t know it. On windy days, we’d climb the tallest pines to the top, then hang on, swaying back and forth, or we’d swim in the river every chance we got. We lived a Huck Finn existence.

  A lot of us cops played high school football and so did Joe. The difference was, Joe could have made it big, we all thought. Everyone around here remembers Gary Lyle, who w
ent pro with the Chicago Bears. Well, Joe and Gary tore up the conference as juniors but, in a practice session just before the start of his senior year, Joe dislocated a shoulder and that ended his season and any hope of a scholarship.

  Two months prior to the Hoss-Lubresky escape from the workhouse, Fescemyer recalled, he and Zanella rented a schoolbus and filled it with kids from the poorer areas of Verona.

  These kids never went many places, so this one time we put about thirty-five of those kids in that bus and took them over to the workhouse for a tour, sort of a crime prevention program. Well, once inside we saw this large man standing there, like someone out of those muscle magazines. It was Thomas Lubresky. If we saw Stanley Hoss that day, we wouldn’t have known it. In that summer before their escape, we’d heard of Hoss but didn’t really know him. He hung out more in New Kensington, Brackenridge, Tarentum, and Indianola. But as to Lubresky … what a scary guy!

  Verona wasn’t the sleepy hollow you might expect. There were a good twenty bars in town, the mills were humming, and good money was made, so, of course, you had the workers coming off shift, then finding a barstool for a shot and a beer. We even had a black speakeasy on Diamond Way, the alley between the two business streets. A juke box was in there, card games, dice, and drinking. This was basically a segregation thing. The town fathers would let the blacks run without a license as long as they stayed in their own bar. And basically they did. The few blacks there were in town had no problem with this, and the whites didn’t either. Then there was the Griltz Hotel and the Track Inn where go-go girls were featured, a new thing at that time. These were probably the two wildest places in Verona.

  Zanella’s other good buddy in the Oakmont Police Department was Dick Zoller. “In the late sixties we had young people, longhairs and all, come in from Pittsburgh and Penn Hills,” said Zoller.

  Remember the girl that got killed by the National Guardsmen at Kent State, Allison Krause? She hung out on Verona’s Main Street. The drugs started coming in. Kenny Eichledinger made his first drug arrest in 1967. It was for marijuana. Soon we were all making these types of busts. We started seeing LSD, speed, quaaludes. You could see and feel the social change. It hit the big cities first, but it came to small towns, too.

  But telling you about Joe, oh yeah, he was a favorite with everybody. He laughed all the time. His wife, Mary Ella, was happy-go-lucky, too, dark-haired, real pretty girl, pretty kid. Joe, handsome as he was, had a big nose and we’d razz him: “Hey Joe, you oughta go to Florida and pick oranges. You could hang by your nose and have two hands free … become a millionaire.” Good-natured stuff. Once, Joe and I pulled a raid on the Legion Hall. We got all these porn films. We maybe kept them a little too long, watched every damn one of them, hootin’ and hollerin’ like young guys will do. Stupid stuff, really. Drank and worked together, hung out and had fun. Me, Fescemyer, the Maroney boys, we were all cops with a cop mentality, you know. We did more to help than anything else. But with us, being a cop was being special. No one knew what being a cop was unless you were a cop. That’s what we thought. We stayed together, mostly in our own circles, shooting pool, playing softball for the bars. We took care of one another.

  . . .

  Only infrequently did the six-man Verona Police Department convene all together for a formal meeting. The shift work and days off made this difficult. Besides, all information glided smoothly from one officer to another by radio or phone, or by exchanging news at shift change. In this way, Officer Joe Zanella learned of the Hoss and Lubresky escape from the workhouse, of Hoss’s presence at Punch Painter’s place, and of the failure to track him down. Lubresky hadn’t been seen at all since the escape on September 11, and as for Hoss, the thinking went, he must have been spooked by the horde of cops and dogs, complete with helicopter, loosed on him on the 14th. Surely he’d left the area, probably to another state.

  The cops knew few escaped convicts were long successful at staying on the sky-side of prison bars. Usually they were busted in another crime or nabbed for a foolish traffic violation. Since Hoss was unlikely to have assets to sustain him, he probably would soon turn to burglary or robbery. Of course, he could turn himself in, but this Hoss would never do. Still, where was he?

  . . .

  On September 18, one week after the workhouse escape, Mrs. Carol Meredith of Hudson, Ohio, drove to a dinner engagement at the Holiday Inn in Boston Heights, about fifteen miles south of Cleveland. She pulled into the parking lot at 6:45 P.M., locking the ignition and doors by habit before going inside. When Carol Meredith came out three hours later, her 1964 yellow white-top Chevy convertible was gone.

  . . .

  Friday, September 19, dawned as a perfect example of Indian summer. The sun shone all day in a particularly blue sky, raising the temperature to a pleasant 70 degrees by noon. At 3:00 P.M., Verona’s schools let out and small clusters of students could be seen, laughing, cutting up, and making plans for the weekend. Whoever could manage to get a jump on rush hour in Pittsburgh and its suburbs was doing so. The exceptional weather brought out an unusual number of people to shop along Verona’s Main Street, while away the time over coffee at Donna Lynn’s Café, or enjoy a beer at Futule’s Tavern. Particularly at week’s end, much conversation turned toward “God’s Pleasure,” which was, of course, Friday night football. Though it was early in the season, Verona High’s game was already shaping up as an important contest. Cribbs Field would be packed.

  As the time approached 4:00 P.M., the end of his shift, Chief Blackie DeLellis drove over to Joe Zanella’s house.

  Joe’s comin’ on shift, so I get out and go sit on the passenger side and Joe gets behind the wheel to take me home. Everything around town was quiet, so I didn’t have much official stuff to pass along. At my house at the time, I was pourin’ new concrete steps, so I changed quick and started workin’. Joe hung around for a few minutes and we were conversin’ like always, general stuff, sports and the like. Deer season came to mind, and I was tellin’ Joe about my neighbor’s boy baggin’ a buck last year that went two hundred pounds. Joe said that’s all he needed, to take up huntin’. He was so busy with his job, the VFD, the reserves, and whatnot, and now his second was born, little Michelle—We were all at the baptism just the Sunday before—why, if Joe even looked at a deer rifle, his Mary Ella would be havin’ fits.

  We both lit up cigarettes, but soon Joe said he had to be goin’ in time to pick up Janina Yanchak, our tax collector. Whoever was on would always drive Mrs. Yanchak to the bank to deposit her receipts.

  In this last minute we were for some reason talkin’ about McDonalds. We didn’t have one, but Pittsburgh did. I said, “When you stop there, you get the bread, the meat, and some potatoes, sort of like a meal.” Joe says, “Yeah, and the dressing on the hamburger serves as a salad,” and laughs. That’s the last bit of conversation we had before he got in the car and left.

  A meeting of the Oakmont police was scheduled for their shift change at 4:00 P.M., so as to gather as many officers as possible. This was to be Oakmont’s very first meeting about arbitration and collective bargaining. The Oakmont force did have a union, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), but no one was much satisfied with FOP representation. It was well known that, as one cop put it, “You’d go in and ask for a raise and they’d tell you to stick it where the sun don’t shine.” The Oakmont cops now favored joining the Teamster union and were planning to push things along with this meeting.

  Joe Zanella’s good friends, Zoller and Fescemyer, were in attendance, along with seven or eight other officers. Claude “Speed” Buttgereit, a former policeman thought by most to be “a nice enough guy but a miserable son-of-a-bitch,” was manning the communications desk. The rest of the men filed into a back room of the station to begin their meeting. Just before the door closed, someone yelled out to Buttgereit, “Hey, Speed, don’t bother us—this is important stuff we’re talking.”

  About 4:30 P.M., as the Oakmont meeting got under way, Officer Joe Zanella was return
ing from Allegheny Valley Bank, bringing Mrs. Yanchak back to her own car, which she’d left outside the borough building in which Verona’s police station was housed on the first floor. Escorting Mrs. Yanchak was routine for Joe; their many short car trips together had made them well acquainted. Mrs. Yanchak had crocheted a beautiful afghan for Joe’s new baby. For his part, Joe knew the names, habits, and many peculiarities of Mrs. Yanchak’s three cats, one dog, and “littlest joy”—her parakeet. She talked, and Joe, with bemused forbearance, listened.

  . . .

  Fred Mangol was only twenty-two years old, but he was already assistant manager of Winky’s Drive-In Restaurant, located along Washington Boulevard about five miles south of Verona. Between 4:15 and 4:20 P.M., while preparing for the rush-hour crowd, Mangol saw someone walk into the restaurant and approach the counter. Christ! Mangol thought, is that … ? The patron looked a little different than he remembered, with shorter hair and a couple-three days’ growth of beard, but as soon as their eyes met Mangol knew for certain. It was Stanley Hoss. Mangol knew Hoss from their early school days. He knew Hoss’s wife’s family, too. He had seen Hoss rarely, which was more than enough for Mangol, as Hoss was no friend, only a schoolyard bully and, later, someone to be avoided.

  Hoss ordered coffee, “black, to go,” from waitress Elizabeth Parker. Mangol turned aside to busy himself, but he was worried. Everyone knew the law was after Hoss. He’d been declared a fugitive after the workhouse breakout, and it was only the previous Sunday that Hoss had eluded capture in a big manhunt after being spotted. “Now he has to show up here, in my restaurant of all places,” Mangol recounted.