Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (20 page)

When he got home, the house smelled like vinegar. They had been dyeing Easter eggs, Susie and the kids. Zachary was dressed like an Indian brave with black yarn for braids and paint on his face. Stacey was crying in her high chair. It had taken only the length of his drive home from the office for the office to seem like a phantasmagoria. In the space of a day, he had lost everything. He shook his head at Susie, then rolled his eyes, then smiled, mock-scolding her for bringing Easter eggs into their Jewish home. Zachary held one up, his mouth gaping, struggling not to drop it.

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“He had nurtured prostitution and gambling in Phoenix for years,” declared the report. Rosenzweig once owned apartments that were rented out to prostitutes whom he supplied to visiting businessmen. References to him as the “Diamond Man” were found in prostitutes’ “trick books.”

—
Time,
March 28, 1977

April 28, 1975—Members of the Phoenix police intelligence squad invite (Moise) Berger to a meeting in the I-squad office. They confront him with several items discovered during the investigation which they felt might affect Berger’s effectiveness in the Warren prosecution: that he had been dating a secretary who worked for a Warren-connected land company; questions about his lack of prosecution on the Warren-related Arizona Land Co. fraud; a stack of Arizona Land Co. forgeries and fraud evidence that had been “lost” by Berger’s office; a statement attributed to Berger that no Jew would go to jail as long as he was county attorney; and the bribery of Brooks—Berger’s investigator—by Warren aides. Berger denies all.

—
Newsday,
March 24, 1977

T
his was Phoenix in the late 1960s and ’70s, a caricature of itself. This was the Phoenix in which my father was murdered. In some other kind of city—if there is another kind of city—things might have gone differently. He refused police protection when he finally had to testify against Warren. He refused, I think, because he couldn’t believe that he lived in the kind of city where witnesses were murdered on their way to a grand jury.

The night I arrived in Phoenix was unusually cold, even for December, and a thick fog hung in the courtyard of my hotel, sent up from the vast, heated swimming pool. It was a slow period for the hotel, and it seemed abandoned that night, spectral, a carefully maintained resort with no other guests but me, stretching out for acres—arcaded walkways, palm trees, fountains, lawns. My room was too big, accentuating the fact that I was there by myself. I ironed some clothes and drank the beers in the minibar. I went through the newspaper clippings: hooded witnesses, judges taking bribes, hit men called “Hopalong” or “One-Eyed Jack.” By the time I went back out into the dark to get another drink at the bar, there was the feeling that it was not 2006 but 1975, that my presence in Phoenix was somehow known. I drove the next morning to Warren’s old house and when I got lost and asked someone for directions, the woman I spoke to was an old friend of one of Warren’s daughters. The city had become my hallucination. I found my name on a street sign in Verde Lakes. I found my father’s grave. I found the stairwell in which he was murdered. When the sun came out, it struck everything at a low angle, and it stayed cool, the trees and buildings cast in shadow. I felt unreal and went for a run on the treadmill back at my hotel. There was no one else there. I went back to my room and got ready for dinner.

The Scottsdale Plaza

PART FOUR

171 known gangsters, most of whom have arrived in the past ten years, reside in Phoenix and Tucson alone. They deal in prostitution, illegal gambling and narcotics smuggling; Arizona, in fact, has become the chief corridor for narcotics entering the U.S. now that Mexico has replaced Turkey as the leading source of heroin. The mobsters have gone unmolested, says the report, because “until recently the prosecutorial system has been marked by incompetence, fuzzy or nonexistent law and brazen bribe taking.”

—
Time,
March 28, 1977

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REPORT OF INTERVIEW OF
ROBERT DOUG HARDIN

CASE: OCI86-0045

DATE OF INTERVIEW: 10 DECEMBER, 1986

LOCATION OF INTERVIEW:

OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

1275 W. WASHINGTON

PHOENIX, ARIZONA

PERSONS PRESENT:

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.