If Looks Could Kill (19 page)

If the 1960s were a time of great social change and political unrest, the 1970s ushered in an era in American pop culture that seemed to curb any collected anxiety that had accumulated up until then. Optimism ruled. As did bell-bottoms, love and peace. Investigative reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward blew the roof off political corruption, exposing the Watergate break-in, proving how inadequate our elected public officials could be with power at their fingertips. The smiley face emerged. So did Rubik’s Cube, the mood ring, the lava lamp and platform shoes. It was a time when you could “clap on” and “clap off” your lights; when families piled into station wagons and RVs and argued their way across country. In Manhattan, Studio 54 fueled the rise of disco. John Travolta tore up the screen in
Saturday Night Fever,
heightening the popularity of sexual promiscuity, the blow-dryer and snorting cocaine into the wee hours of the morning. America had changed. She had emerged from war, protest, cynicism and the psychedelic era a more edgy, open, free republic.

By the late 1970s, Akron, Ohio, had grown into a city of 275,000, with public housing and contemporary office-space infrastructure rising on just about every major street corner. This population figure was down from the 1960s, when Akron’s populace hit its peak at three hundred thousand. Crime had always been a problem, of course, same as it was in any major American city. But Akron saw an unusually large number of methamphetamine labs pop up amid downtown and its surrounding suburbs; and cops knew that where that type of homemade drug exsisted, death was not too far behind.

According to sources of mine who knew Ed George personally, Ed was never an outgoing, “let’s watch the sunrise type” of barhopper or partier. Just because he grew up in that generation, and had spent his life (since he was fifteen years old) in a restaurant and bar, it didn’t mean he had to conform to the shameful habits of its patrons. Ed was a working man. His father had opened the Tangier in 1948, and built the operation into an Akron staple for entertainment and authentic Mediterranean cuisine. The décor of the place allowed patrons to feel as if they’d walked onto the set of a period film. Yul Brynner or
Ben-Hur
came to mind upon entry. People loved the authenticity and feel of the place. It was different from anything else in Akron. Ed learned from his father rather quickly that there was no substitution for hard work—and the restaurant-going public benefited from the Georges’ hard-nosed European work ethic.

In 1976, the elder George passed away. Ed, then thirty-six years old, having gone to one of Akron’s most elite private schools, St. Vincent, and then to Michigan State and John Carroll University (studying what else, business administration), took total control of the Tangier’s day-to-day operations, and continued to turn his father’s vision into his own dream. Two years after he took the reins, with business booming, Ed was walking one night from the kitchen to the bar when he was stopped dead in his tracks by the sight of a gorgeous blonde tearing up the dance floor. There she was: showy, thin, attractive, radiant. People were obviously drawn to her; she controlled the room. Without her, it would have been just another night at the Tangier, but Cynthia brought a brilliance to the place and turned the night into something more festive and flamboyant. She was twenty-three then, full of life, working for an airline, ready to take on Akron.

Ed and Cynthia talked. And quickly hit it off. Ed fell in love. Soon Cynthia was a fixture inside the restaurant. People were shocked. Ed had lived a solitary life of work for so long, he seemed destined to die alone (probably inside the restaurant). He had been a bachelor and proud of it. But Cynthia had managed to work her way into that world and change his mind.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Tangier took off. Ed was a smart—though sometimes crude—businessman, and people respected him. By 1984, Ed and Cynthia, dating now for nearly six years, decided to make it official.

At St. Joseph Catholic Church, near Cynthia’s home-town in Canton, the happy couple exchanged vows in front of not only five hundred friends and relatives, but a sixty-piece choir, which included Cynthia’s mother, Helen Rohr, belting out a reported two solos during the ceremony.

An Akron power couple was born.

With a wedding ceremony of such immense size, it seemed only fitting that the reception following the service should be fit for a king and queen. Always thinking business, Ed and Cynthia decided to marry on a Monday so the reception wouldn’t affect any weekend business at the Tangier. They departed the church, according to some who were on hand for the ceremony and published reports, in a limousine dressed with tin cans dangling from the bumper; from there, the fairy tale continued as they sat in a horse-drawn white carriage, pulled by a white horse.

In 1988, in one of the many articles written about Ed and the Tangier, the
Akron Beacon Journal
asked Ed about his life, noting that he and Cynthia, who had lived in a condominium since tying the knot, built a large farm on a 126-acre lot of farmland Ed owned. “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” Ed told
Beacon Journal
reporter Abe Zaidan. “My wife says she needed room to breathe. We’re going to have a lot of room to breathe now.” Later in that same article, Ed added, “I used to be a male chauvinist. Now I have three women (a wife and two daughters) at home, and whatever they tell me to do, that’s what I do. I married a woman that doesn’t let you get away with anything. I change diapers and dress the kids. Sometimes I make mistakes and put their clothes on backward or inside out. But I’m learning…I’m now doing all of the things that I used to criticize other people for doing.”

Ed embodied the change; he loved being a father and husband. He and Cynthia had the perfect life: healthy kids, booming business, big house and more money than they needed.

But business slowed into the 1990s and Ed felt the restaurant needed a major makeover. By 2000, he was in the middle of a reported $750,000 reconstruction project, which Cynthia was overseeing on just about every level. “We’re going to go back to the past,” Ed told
Akron Beacon Journal
’s business writer Shana Yates at the time, “to remind people of how we were and how important we are to the community.”

As time moved forward, and Cynthia George continued to give birth to Ed’s growing little army of children, she was obviously unhappy on some level. Several friends and former Tangier employees later said that Cynthia was always flirting with men and being overly friendly, which, many assumed, led to several affairs throughout the years. Cynthia never seemed content. She always wanted more. Maybe even thought she deserved it.

Maybe because he was so busy trying to save a sinking ship, or focusing any free time he had on raising a large family and keeping his material wife happy, Ed either knew about Cynthia’s affairs and looked the other way, or was simply blinded by, as Cynthia later said in court documents, his “workaholic” ways.

In either case, the CAPU had many questions for Ed that attorney Bob Meeker was keeping him from answering. Ed Moriarty would pop into the Tangier from time to time and corner Ed, but he knew what to say. Moriarty felt Ed wanted to talk—like he had something he was always ready to spill—but he could never get him to open up.

On September 6, Detective Russ McFarland and a colleague flew down to Florida to interview Seth. Carl had been scratched off the CAPU’s list of suspects. He had an alibi and had done fairly well on a polygraph. If Seth wasn’t willing to take a polygraph himself, there was going to be a problem. The ongoing dispute Seth had with Jeff Zack at the time of Jeff’s murder was enough for the CAPU to drag the contractor in.

Much to McFarland’s surprise, Seth was “cooperative” and eagerly agreed to take a polygraph, signing a release the moment it was placed in front of him. According to Seth, Jeff’s family and others had the story all wrong. Indeed, he and Jeff had been involved in a bad business deal regarding some work on Jeff’s house Seth had proposed, but they had dealt with it, up until the end, fairly civilly. Their talks had never gotten heated or personal—that is, Seth said, “until Jeff called me on.”

“What happened?” asked McFarland.

“Jeff made a remark about my wife. He said, ‘I f- - - ed her in the ass.’”

“Leave my family out of it,” Seth shot back, seething, “you motherless f- - -.”

Jeff had never taken an insult himself without responding. That much the CAPU knew.

“I know people,” Jeff said next, according to Seth, “that can slit your throat.”

“I became enraged,” Seth explained to McFarland. “I told him, ‘Don’t you ever threaten me, because you may be looking over your back the rest of your life.’”

McFarland took out the tape of the threatening voice mail Jeff had received shortly before he was murdered. “I want you to listen to this,” he told Seth.

“Play it.”

“Was that you?” McFarland asked after they listened to the tape.

“No. It’s not me, and I have no idea who it is. I had
nothing
to do with Jeff Zack’s murder. Nothing whatsoever.”

During his polygraph, Seth was asked, “Do you know for sure who killed Jeff Zack? Did you conspire with anyone to kill Jeff Zack? Do you know for sure why Jeff Zack was killed? On June 13, 2001, did you make the telephone call to Jeff Zack that we just played for you?”

Seth answered no to the four questions. Polygraphist Sean Methany, who had made the trip with McFarland, later calculated that “based on analysis of the polygrams generated by [Seth], it is my opinion that physiological change indicative of truthfulness occurred on all four relevant questions.”

“I spoke with [Seth] twice on the telephone before going to Florida,” McFarland said later. “He admitted to having heated exchanges with Jeff Zack and even admitted to threatening to kill him. He also said Zack threatened to kill him. But he adamantly denied acting on his threat. When Methany gave [Seth] his polygraph, he passed on all questions. He was then eliminated as a suspect.”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, McFarland and Methany packed their bags, left Sarasota and traveled to Fort Myers, where McFarland had some unfinished business regarding another homicide. It had been a productive trip; Seth could be scratched off the CAPU’s short list of suspects. At least for the time being.

When McFarland and Methany left Fort Myers and started traveling on I-75 north, heading toward the airport in Tampa, passing through Sarasota, news that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers in New York City came over the radio and startled them. “Our first impression was that it was a small plane. A short time later, news came over the radio that a second plane hit the other Tower. Then things became clearer.”

As they continued toward the airport,
Marine One
flew overhead at a high rate of speed. By the time they reached the outskirts of Tampa, news that all of the airports in the country were closing came over the radio. Within a few minutes, they learned that the worst terrorist attack on American soil had just taken place. There was no way they could fly out of Florida, back to Ohio. “We turned in our rental car,” McFarland recalled, “and had to walk two blocks to another rental agency that did out-of-state, point-to-point rentals. We got the last rental car out of Tampa. We had to settle for what was available, so we rode to Pittsburgh in a Lincoln Town Car. We picked up a [CAPU] car there and drove back to Akron.”

Back in Ohio, as McFarland and Methany headed home in a rental car, the morning of September 11 began in a panic. But not for the events unfolding in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania—or because of something having gone wrong in the Jeff Zack investigation.

Dave Whiddon and other members of the CAPU were preparing to serve a search warrant on a house where the CAPU believed a career criminal named Daniel Laniesky, who had gone by the alias of Daniel Hopkins, lived. The CAPU had been investigating a home invasion in which two suspects broke into a home in one of Akron’s more affluent neighborhoods and tied up the owners. Over the past few weeks, Whiddon and his team had tracked credit cards stolen from the couple and found out they were being used at a Super Kmart in Montrose, just outside of Akron. Whiddon had gotten his hands on video surveillance from the store and saw Laniesky and another guy going through the store on a shopping spree. While this information was coming in, the CAPU found out Laniesky had several federal warrants already out for his arrest. On the morning of September 11, Whiddon got a search warrant for a house where he believed both suspects were holed up. So he assembled a SWAT team. But during a briefing that morning about the case, someone walked into the room and interrupted, saying terrorists had attacked New York. “We canceled the warrant,” Whiddon said later, “because everyone was now watching CNN. The mayor also called and wanted all available personnel on the street.”

In the meantime, a call came in about a shooting—the CAPU had another homicide on their hands. Whiddon sent most of his detectives to the shooting.

When “things,” as Whiddon later put it, quieted down toward the afternoon, the detective working the home invasion case wondered if it was a good time to serve the search warrant. “We hit the house, but Laniesky and [his partner],” Whiddon recalled, “were not there. We did find out from one of their girlfriends that they were at the Red Roof in Montrose.”

And that’s where the situation took a frantic turn.

Whiddon and Ed Moriarty drove out to the hotel and met with the SWAT commanders (one of whom was Terry Hudnall, who had also become part of the Jeff Zack investigation) in the parking lot of the Cracker Barrel Restaurant, located in back of the Red Roof Inn.

For the next four to five hours, there was a standoff between law enforcement and Laniesky, who had barricaded himself in his room and, speaking by phone with a negotiator, said he wasn’t coming out alive.

For Whiddon, the day had been a series of traumatic events. He remembered the day well because September 11 is also his birthday. His wife, on that day, had called him repeatedly to wish him a happy birthday. Whiddon’s kids had baked him a cake. His wife wanted to know when he was going to be home to blow out the candles and open presents. Regardless of what had happened in New York, Whiddon and his wife—God bless them—wanted their children to have as normal a day as possible.

After hours of negotiations going nowhere, a decision was made to flush the guy out of his room with tear gas. Whiddon was standing next to a detective when he heard the explosion of the gas go through the window. “We ran out of the lobby, and just as I was coming around the corner, Laniesky came out….”

Outside the hotel now, Laniesky had an arsenal of firepower and started to unleash a barrage of bullets on anything in his way.

Within seconds, however, the SWAT team responded and, returning fire, dropped Laniesky with several rounds to his head and chest.

As that happened, Whiddon’s cell phone rang.

“Yeah,” he said excitedly, out of breath.

“When are you coming home?” his wife wanted to know.

“Not for a while.”

In the volley of bullets going back and forth, Terry Hudnall got shot in the foot.

Finally, around three o’clock the next morning, Whiddon walked through the door of his home. Sitting on the couch with his wife, just trying to catch his breath and take in all that had happened, he realized he hadn’t eaten anything all day long. So he shoved down a piece of birthday cake and called it a day. “[My wife and I] just sat there talking in disbelief about all that went on that day,” Whiddon recalled, “both in New York and Akron. September 11, 2001, was the longest day of my police career—but absolutely nothing compared to what the NYPD and NYFD had gone through.”