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Dan Kennedy (1:08)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy and the Moth features true stories told live without notes. All stories from the podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York, Los Angeles, and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org.

Jay Allison (1:27)

Hi, this is Jay Allison up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Right now, we're producing our second batch of stories for the Moth Radio Hour. Our first season aired on over 200 public radio stations around the country, which makes it a big hit by public radio standards. So we're doing it again. We're putting together five more hours of amazing stories hosted by the Moth team, distributed by PRX.org and featuring backstage interviews and other cool bits like we are inviting everyone in the world to pitch us their stories, including you podcast listeners. You can check the pitch page@themost.org to find out more about that. To hear the Moth Radio Hour on the air, contact your local public radio station and find out when they'll be airing it. We hope you like it. Thanks.

Dan Kennedy (2:16)

The story you're about to hear by Eric Koenigsberg was recorded live at the Moth main Stage back in 2006. The theme of the evening was Never mind, I'll just sit in the dark.

Eric Konigsberg (2:27)

Stories about Guilt when I was 26 years old, I was assigned a magazine story about a Mafia murder case. I called a former detective to interview him. He didn't know anything about the case, but he wanted to know about my last name. He asked if I was related to the famous Konigsberg. I thought he meant Woody Allen, whose real name is Allen Konigsberg, and he's no relation to me. He said, no, no, no. I'm talking about Harold Konigsberg, the famous mafia hitman. I thought this was pretty far out, so I called my father. I said, have you ever heard of this guy, Harold Konigsberg, the famous mafia hitman? He said, yes, that's my Uncle Heschi. He said he was Grandpa Leo's younger brother. I don't know that much about him. Please tell me you told this person you're not related to him. He said, why would you want your name, our family name, attached to someone like that? He said to drop the assignment and to never write about the Mafia. So I dropped the assignment. I was always very close to my parents, and at that point I had no problem heeding their guidance and direction. It had served me well. Still, I was pretty surprised by my father's reaction. My family is as generic as Midwestern Jews come. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. My father is a surgeon. It was the only time I'd heard my father use an important sounding expression like our family name. But I was pretty curious. So I went to the library. I found out that Harold Konigsberg was indeed a legendary mafia hitman. His nickname was Ko Ko Konigsberg, as in K period, O period for knockout. He had been an amateur boxer, and when that didn't go so well, he traded up to a life of organized crime. He worked for four of the five mafia families in New York, plus the one in New Jersey. He was kind of a freelance independent contractor. He sometimes worked for more than one family at the same time if he felt like it. He was known also as the king of all loan sharks. He conducting business out of a half dozen offices in New York and New Jersey. He claimed to have a million dollars on the street at any given time. I came across a story in life magazine from 1968. It said quoted a federal federal official saying the mafia considered the hulking Ko an animal on the leash for them. All they had to do was unsnap the leash and he'd kill for the fun of it. He was also very smart. Apparently he had taught himself the law and represented himself in two major trials. Then he wrote his own appeals in prison and got a murder conviction against himself. Overturn. So one night in 1997, I got a voicemail. It went something like this. Well, I'm not going to give you a message. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Tomorrow's another day. If you're home between 8 and 8:30, I'll call you, we'll talk, we'll have a nice conversation. And I'm telling you, it's a very, very interesting conversation. Mr. Konigsberg. That's your name, ain't it? Eric Konigsberg? All right, kid, take care and God bless. So I played the message for my father. He said, yeah, that's Uncle Heschi. He said, don't tell your grandmother about this. So the next time I saw my grandmother, I asked her about Uncle Heschi, told her he called. What had happened is I had mentioned who my great uncle was to an editor at the New Yorker who'd given me an assignment to write about him. And my father had somehow come around to this. It wasn't that he believed in that there was any value to what I was doing. But it was a pretty big break and I needed the work. My grandmother and the aunts, we were all together. My aunts, my great aunts, Harold, Harold's other sisters. At my grandmother's 80th birthday party in Las Vegas. My grandmother, she loves the slots. And when I mentioned Harold's name, everybody groaned. One of my aunts said, you won't learn anything about us from him. What does he have to do with us? And my grandmother sort of played him off as a braggart and blowhard. She claimed not to know that he was in prison for murder. She described him as a ghaniff, a crook. And she said, don't go. Don't go to see him. He will never leave you alone. What good could possibly come of it? My grandmother explained that when she and my grandfather were starting out, they had a business. He was a butter and eggman in Bayonne, N.J. and living there and having a business there in the same town where Harold was so well known, was a great burden to be under. She said they spent 30, 40 years ignoring his existence, not taking his phone calls. My entire generation, my brother and me, our cousins, none of us had even known about him. They had tried to erase him. She said, now, after all this, this is what you want us to be known for? She said, why don't you write a nice story about my 80th birthday party? She said, please don't go up there. So in the summer of 1998, I went to Auburn called Correctional Facility to visit my great uncle Harold. Auburn is in upstate New York. He's serving a life sentence for the murder of a teamster's boss. And he had seen my byline in a magazine and figured out that I'm his great nephew, which is why he had called for me. And what was I going to say? And so up I went. I went to Auburn. I had this assignment, and it was a great assignment. It was a big career break, so I went there and I waited in the visitor's room, and in walked my great uncle. He was big and fat, with beautiful long white hair like my grandfather's. He reminded me a lot of my gentle giant of a grandfather, the butter and eggman, who was. Who was just, you know, who was obsessed with his reputation as a decent and honest person and a very kind, sweet man. He had blue eyes like my grandfather. And I extended my hand to shake hands, and he said, what the fuck kind of way is that? To greet family? And instead he planted a kiss on my mouth. Then he asked after all our living relatives by name, people he'd never met. He was showing off. Harold was a paradoxical figure, just as I'd heard him described by others. He was at once very seductive, very appealing when he wanted to be. Very charming and also very frightening. He knew how to play for my sympathies. He told me how his sisters and my grandfather and grandmother had sat Shiva for him at one point when he went away to prison, how they never took his calls and they hadn't in decades. He said that he asked me to bring in a picture once of the family. And I brought a photograph of me and my cousins and the aunts, my grandmother, from her 80th birthday party. And he looked at it, and I saw a tear rolled down his cheek. And he said, now that's a complete family. He once was asking about the cousins. We figured out that of the six cousins in my grandmother's grandchildren, I was the only one who wasn't in graduate school at the time. We had three in law school. My brother was in med school, and I had a cousin at Wharton. And he asked why I didn't want to go to grad school. I said, well, you know, I guess I kind of like to do my own thing. And he said, sounds to me you're a lot like your Uncle Harold. And I admit that from this, somehow, I took some measure of satisfaction. At the same time, he could be very frightening. When I had first gotten up there, I asked why he had summoned me, and he said, I'm thinking about taking the story of my life and fictionalizing it some. He said, then we Sell it to those Weinstein brothers at Miramar Pictures. Thought we could make some money. I was very. I made it very clear that I had this assignment from the New Yorker. I had to write a true story about him. He was ambivalent about that. Sometimes he talked. Sometimes he talked some more. I always went up there thinking he wasn't going to see me, kind of hoping he wasn't. And he would. Sometimes he threw out Don Vito, like threats. He would tell me a story. He would brag about murders he committed without ever completely incriminating himself. Or he would talk about the fights he got in in prison. And he would. Sometimes he would tell a story and say, but you're not going to write that. I'd say, of course I am. He'd say, well, I don't think you would do that. Or he'd say, if you wrote that, then I don't know you. It was pretty unsettling. And after a while, I decided to stop visiting him. I saw him 10 times over the first year, year plus, and I realized I could learn a lot more about him. Pursuing other avenues, I interviewed dozens and dozens of people. Prosecutors, his lawyers, detectives, FBI agents, other gangsters, family members of his victims. Turned out there were a lot of victims. Although he was only convicted of one murder, I found through obtaining some sealed FBI files that he had confessed to as many as 20 murders under some kind of very flimsy immunity agreement. And none of those others had been prosecuted. So I was in no hurry to get back up there and see him again. I turned in a story and my editor said, it's fine. It's just one thing. You need to go back up there one more time. He said, you need to give him the chance to answer to what you found out about him. And he said, it would be great if your great uncle would cooperate with the magazine's fact checking department. I had gotten a couple of letters from Harold right after I stopped visiting, wondering where the hell I was. And then he had. Those had stopped and I. And I, you know, I was really nervous going back up. I flew upstate one last time and I waited in the visitor's room. And I had a feeling this was coming, that I knew I was going to have to see him one more time. I'd been rehearsing this for a little while. He sat down with me in the visitor's room, and I said I had a lot of impatient editors on my hands and the magazine was going to press the following week with my story on him. And Harold took this in very calmly, he nodded, absorbing my words. He said, the day an article comes out that has your name on it and my name in it, I'm going to kill you. Yeah, you laugh. You laugh. I didn't know what to say to this. He said, the kind of person that would shame his family like this. You forfeit your blood connection and to think you're a kohen. He said. He said it would give him great pleasure. I invoked my matriarch of a grandmother's name. I said how my grandmother and the great aunts had all talked to me about him. He said, it would give me great pleasure for your grandmother to come visit you at your grave. He said, I can't believe you're killing me. After 38 years I've been in here and you're killing me like this. You wouldn't last 38 minutes in this place. He's been in prison continuously since 1961. And I mustered. I was really proud of this. I said, but, Harold. Because I couldn't call him Uncle Heschi, and I couldn't even call him Heschi. After a while, it just felt too familiar. He said, but, Harold, I'm not the one killing you. You're the one who did these things you've done. He said, that kind of double talk, that's worthy of torture. He said, I'm going to chop you up a hundred different ways, and you can put that in your fucking magazine. Then he asked me to get him an orange soda. So he drank the soda, and he held the bottle, the empty bottle in the air. He said, you see this? I said, yeah, I see that. He said, I'm gonna shove this up your ass and light a firecracker in it. Then he went back to listing all the ways he was going to kill me. He made a claw. He saw me look toward the guards who were right there, made a claw with his thumb and forefingers. He said, I only need this to kill you. I could go right through your eye and rip your fucking brain out of your head before the guards get here. He said something. Something about strangling me with the boot lace and maybe some other things that I'm not remembering. So finally I realized I don't have to take this any longer. So I stood up and I walked to the edge of the room. And then I realized, I can't just leave like this. So I turned around. I said, you know, I mean you no harm. And then in a voice that was so menacing, in a voice that. That really made me feel that everything I'd read and learned about him over the past couple years was very true and very believable. He said, I mean you harm. Yeah, yeah. Laugh all you want, but I was terrified. I was really frightened. I flew back to New York and I didn't want to go home, so I checked into a hotel. My editor called from the New Yorker. I told him about it. He said, that's very powerful material. And then my father called. He knew that I was going up there, and he was very concerned, and I didn't want to tell him about it, but I told him about it. And he said, well, you're not going to pull the story. He said, I didn't raise my son to be a writer so he could let some villain tell him what to do. I thought this was a lovely sentiment, but still, Harold was threatening to kill me. My father said he really didn't know what else he could do. He said, call your grandmother. Everyone listens to her. So I told a friend of mine. She said, oh, so Granny's gonna call off the hit. It was really humiliating. It was humiliating. I'd never seen my father frightened before, and I haven't since. My mother called me up. She said, your father is pacing around the house. I can't believe you're doing this to him. She said, when I say your father is white as a sheet, he's white as a sheet. I called my grandmother and I got a round of I told you so's. She said, you said you wanted to write about him. She said, oh, Heschi's a lot of hot air. And she said. She said, well, I wish you hadn't done this, but nobody threatens my grandson. So we devised a plan. We devised a plan. She would get Harold's adult daughter on the phone. Part of Harold's ambivalence to my writing about him had to do with embarrassing his daughters. Part of it had to do with he thought I was hurting his chances of parole. And so she said she would get his daughter on the phone. When she got his daughter on the phone, she said, how do I know that you'll be able to calm him down? The adult daughter said, well, my sister and I are all he has right now. He does whatever we tell him. So I wish I could tell you that this episode brought about a new era of openness for my family, but it didn't. In fact, not that long ago, my grandmother came to visit my family. It was a few months ago. My book came out in October. It was during the summer she said, so what are you working on? I said, well, you know, I have this book coming out. Oh really? Oh that? I said, yeah, it's about Harold. She said, oh, that poor schmuck. I said, the poor schmuck? He threatened to kill me. He said, well, he doesn't like you. He said, why would you write a story about someone and only mention the bad things? And my father, I was very touched by this. He spoke up. He said, mother, didn't you read what Eric wrote? He killed 20 people. He's a murderer. And my grandmother said, really? How can they say he killed someone if they never found the body? That's it. Thanks.