Relatives of Harold Konisberg's victims rage as remorseless hit man is sprung from upstate Mohawk Prison and living out his final days at posh Florida gated community

[url=http://m.nydailynews.com/1.1132298][/url]

8.09.2012, 01:14 AM


Legendary Jewish gangster Harold (Kayo) Konigsberg has been sprung from an upstate prison in a surprise parole decision that will allow him to live out his final days in a posh gated community in Florida, the Daily News has learned.

The still-remorseless 86-year-old mob hit man was quietly released in June from the maximum-security Mohawk Prison, where he spent nearly five decades for a gangland murder.

He might have died behind bars after being sentenced to 20 years to life for the 1961 contract killing of Teamsters big Anthony (Three Fingers) Castellito, on orders from union rival Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano.

Konigsberg — suspected by the feds in as many as 20 other mid-20th century mob hits — used a Venetian blind cord to strangle Castellito in the kitchen of the dead man’s upstate vacation home. His body was buried in New Jersey but never found.

Retired NYPD detective and veteran mob buster Joseph Coffey said it’s a disgrace that Konigsberg is free.

“I knew him well and he was the worst of the worst,” Coffey said. “He enjoyed killing and enjoyed getting paid for it.

“He was a nasty bastard and he should have gotten the (electric) chair.”

Jennie Castellito was just 13 when her dad was killed.

“When ‘Tony Pro’ died in prison — he had cancer — that was the greatest news I heard,” she told The News.

She had hoped the same fate awaited Konigsberg: to be hauled out of the Rome, N.Y., prison in a body bag.

“My father’s dead and he didn’t have the last 49 years to spend alive with his children and grandchildren,” she said. “I don’t think he should have been released. I don’t understand it.”

Vicious mob killer Harold Konisberg trades jail cell for posh digs in sunny Florida after serving 49 years in prison.
Konigsberg, who had been locked up since 1963, has maintained his innocence in the Castellito rubout. He’s been denied parole seven times since 1998, but has been housed in the prison hospital for nearly two years with unspecified maladies that appear to have contributed to his release, parole records show.

The octogenarian showed not a whiff of regret or sorrow at the April parole hearing that ultimately led to his freedom.

“This is over 50 years old. When does it end? I mean you can’t keep holding it against somebody for 50 years, 60 years, and say the crime was this or that,” he whined, according to a hearing transcript.

Castellito, who lives in Florida, said she was not notified by the New York Division of Parole about Konigsberg’s release, and was never given the chance to offer a victim-impact statement. She said she’s outraged Konigsberg is now living about 130 miles away.

There was no answer Wednesday at the pink-stucco, waterfront home Konigsberg now shares with his daughter Edie in Weston, Fla.

An ashtray on a table outside the house — which is valued at $750,000, records show — held three cigarette butts and a cigar. A housekeeper, who said she’d just returned with a repaired pair of pants for Konigsberg, declined to comment.

Konigsberg’s colorful mob life was chronicled by his nephew Eric Konigsberg in an article in The New Yorker and a book, “Blood Relation.”

Taken under the wing of gangster Abner (Longy) Zwillman — the so-called “Al Capone of New Jersey” — Konigsberg was a violent and feared racketeer in Jersey City and Manhattan.

He also earned a reputation as a major loanshark who pummeled deadbeats with a lead-lined rubber hose. Back in the day, doing time in the Hudson County Jail was a breeze for the thug.

“He had a private apartment done over for him in the jail library, with his own TV, telephone, radio, refrigerator, hot plate, desk and sofa,” Eric Konigsberg wrote in The New Yorker. It was even alleged that a shapely young blond, Marilyn Jane Fraser, was smuggled into his cell in 1965 to provide him female companionship, The News reported at the time.

Comely Marilyn Fraser was linked to jailed killer Konigsberg for what was described back then as “immoral purposes.”
New York State Parole Commissioners Sally Thompson and Michael Hagler stated no reason on the record for granting Konigsberg’s release.

He’s been in the prison’s hospital since October 2010, and he offered this gripe in a 2008 hearing.

Board spokeswoman Carole Weaver said she couldn’t discuss his medical issues, which were discussed at the April hearing but are redacted from the record.

In 2008, Konigsberg complained that he has spent an excessive amount of time in prison because he rebuffed then-U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s effort to make him rat out the mob.

“There was no way he could break me,” the tough guy said, according to a 2008 hearing. “The Nazis, the Germans, those people that were not hanged at Nuremberg didn’t do 20 years,” he ranted.

Coffey said it was very unusual for the Mafia to use non-Italians to do their hits, but Konigsberg was an exception because of his ruthlessness. Konigsberg insisted to the parole board that he was not insane, but Coffey recalled that the hoodlum represented himself at an extortion trial in Manhattan Supreme Court and claimed he was crazy.

“He sat in a wheelchair and (defecated) in his pants right in front of the judge,” Coffey said. “I was there and he grossed out everyone and cleared the courtroom, but he was convicted anyway. I remember it like it was yesterday.” 

The two Parole Board members who freed Harold (Kayo) Konigsberg from prison offered no explanation for cutting loose the stone-cold killer.

With good reason. Whatever they might have said would have been an insult to justice.

Michael Hagler and Sally Thompson could not have said Kongisberg had repented for the murder he committed as a particularly vicious mob hit man — he was not contrite in the least.

And they could not have said he was a cooperative parole applicant — he held them in contempt.

And they could not have said relatives of the man he was convicted of garrot ing were okay with the release — they never consulted his family.

And they could not have said they believe Konigsberg’s half century behind bars is sufficient — his victims are dead forever.

And they could not have said that, at the age of 86 and suffering from unspecified health issues, Konigsberg was becoming a financial burden on the prison system — penny-pinching is not cause for opening the cell door.

All the more astonishing, Hagler and Thompson have lengthy backgrounds as cops and criminal investigators. They should have known better than to end Konigsberg’s punishment.

A loan shark with especially violent collection methods and a suspect in 20 mob killings, Konigsberg in 1961 murdered Anthony (Three Fingers) Castellito at the order of Genovese capo Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, who was later convicted in the killing and died in prison.

In 1998, Konisberg began appearing before parole commissioners, always glorying in studied wiseguy arrogance. Seven times, the commissioners turned him down flat. Then he showed up before Hagler and Thompson and they cut him a break, even th ough he was as unapologetic and disrespectful as ever.

In an added turn of the knife, Konigsberg now lives in a waterfront house in Florida, a few hours’ drive from the home of his victim’s daughter. Her father cannot be paroled from his fate, nor can she be paroled from her suffering. Konigsberg should have served his life without parole.

Joe Coffey was right in calling Koenigsberg "the worst of the worst." Just ask his nephew, who wrote a book about him. But Coffey was wrong in saying it was "very unusual" for the Mafia to use non-Mafia contract killers. In fact, it was quite sual.

To most of his relatives, Harold (Kayo) Konigsberg, a racketeer and hit man who managed to kill on the order of 20 people before eventually being convicted and sent away, was a shande - Yiddish for source of shame. But to his great-nephew Eric, a talented and ambitious young journalist, Uncle Harold was also a gift from Got. First he profiled Heshy - that's what the Konigsberg family called Harold - for The New Yorker, and now he has expanded that article into an absorbing and marvelously told, if a bit overreaching, book, "Blood Relation."

Enlarge This Image

Courtesy the Jersey Journal
.
280 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.

Forum: Book News and Reviews
Harold was a troublemaker from the beginning, "a malevolently wild creature in a house full of Sabbath-keepers," as Konigsberg writes. At the age of 11, he stuck up a DeSoto dealership with a knife. A couple of years later, when an older boy demanded a piece of the craps game that Harold was operating in an empty lot near his parents' home in Bayonne, N.J., Harold pulled a gun on him. Post-puberty, Harold's budding career as a criminal really took off. During the 1940's, 50's and early 60's, while so many of his fellow Jewish Americans led the sorts of square, virtuous lives that have since been immortalized by a handful of memorable Philip Roth patriarchs, he stole, ran numbers, hijacked, assaulted and murdered.

Konigsberg has done an enormous amount of research, interviewing his great-uncle in prison repeatedly, reading through thousands of pages of court testimony and speaking with dozens of people who knew him, from fellow hoodlums to F.B.I. agents. All this legwork comes through in his vivid portrait of Harold. Imagine a Nicholas Pileggi creation punched up by Woody Allen and you've pretty much got the idea: not long after being acquitted in his first murder trial, Harold checked with his family to make sure they were O.K. with his marrying a shiksa. Most impressively, Konigsberg resists the urge to romanticize his great-uncle, who could be charming - "adorable" even, according to one of his many lawyers - but who was, at bottom, a sociopath. The author's graceful, perfectly pitched prose is marred only by occasional journalistic tics, including the tendency to place the reader at the scene of too many interviews with peripheral characters.

But Konigsberg aspires to do more than merely recount Harold's exploits. At the heart of "Blood Relation" are the author's pursuit of his uncle's story and, inevitably, the mostly uniform reaction of his various relatives to his insistence on exposing this dark corner of family history. (Aunt Shelley sums up the consensus view at a family reunion in Las Vegas: "What does he have to do with us?")

Konigsberg is a likable narrator, and this secondary plotline produces some priceless moments. At the start of their first meeting in a prison in upstate New York, Harold orders Konigsberg to buy him a couple of ice cream sandwiches. One gets stuck in the vending machine, and a guard helps the author extricate it. "What are you, a cripple?" Harold asks. Later, when Konigsberg's grandmother learns that Harold has lost his temper and threatened to kill his great-nephew if he publishes an article about him, she calls her grandson to express her sympathy - for Harold: "Eric, they're going to punish him by putting him into a place where he doesn't get to leave or see anybody or talk to his daughters for the next two years. . . . Uncle Heshy's going to die in solitary."

At times, though, the narrative of Konigsberg's journey feels forced. He frames "Blood Relation" as an effort to uncover a hidden family secret, as though he has a personal stake in Heshy's story. The desire to give his search this added bit of urgency is understandable, yet not quite persuasive: Konigsberg and his great-uncle Harold are, as the title suggests, blood relations, but the connection feels pretty distant.

Konigsberg also works a little too hard to invest Heshy, and his family's attitude toward him, with deeper significance, quoting Jewish demographers and criminal psychiatrists to not especially illuminating effect, and straining to find meaning where it may not exist: "I wondered whether Harold's unlawful livelihood signified to the Konigsbergs how far they had been forced to travel in order to leave the ghetto behind, or how close to it they still were." By the end of the book, even Konigsberg is prepared to admit that the whole story may be less complicated than he was initially inclined to believe: "Now it is not so hard for me to see the wisdom of their defensive formations," he writes of his family, having at this point learned more than enough about his great-uncle the murderer. It's an honest, if not entirely satisfying, conclusion to a mesmerizing expedition.