The New Yorker:

By Philip Gourevitch

On November 15, 1944, an Army deserter named Frank Gilbert Koehler was arrested for burglary in New York City. Frankie, as he liked to be called, had no criminal record. He had walked off his post at Fort Dix, New Jersey, after suffering unsustainable financial reversals in a crap game, and when it was discovered that he was fifteen years old, and had lied about his age in order to enlist, he was sent to Childrens Court, declared a juvenile delinquent, and returned to military control. Six months later, Koehler—awol again, and for good—shot and killed a sixteen-year-old boy in an abandoned building on West Twenty-fourth Street. The next day; he surrendered to a policeman on a street corner, and was taken to a station house, where he confessed. In court, he pleaded guilty, and the judge sent him upstate to serve five years at the Elmira Reformatory. He was released on May 17, 1950, and remained a free man for eight months and nine days, until he was found by police, hiding between the tracks of the Third Avenue Elevated train line, after robbing a bar-and-grill at gunpoint. A news photograph of Koehler, taken that night, showed him to be a slight, dark-haired man, rather handsome and dapperly dressed, in an overcoat, business suit, necktie, and handcuffs. When the picture appeared in the next day’s Mirror, he was recognized by the bookkeeper of a Murray Hill construction company as one of two gunmen who had, a month earlier, robbed her payroll. Koehler admitted to both heists, and once again he was transferred upstate, this time to Green Haven prison, in Stormville, with a sentence of ten to twenty years. He served eleven and a half, and was paroled in August of 1962, at the age of thirty-three, having spent half of his life “away.”

Before the year was out, Frankie Koehler had a wife and a job in a machine shop. Later, he found union work at the New York Coliseum, on Columbus Circle, and he did not come to the attention of the police again until February 18, 1970. Around eight o’clock that evening, he was having drinks at Channel Seven, a restaurant on West Fifty-fourth Street, when he got into an argument with the owner, Pete McGinn, and a friend of McGinn’s named Richie Glennon. The issue was a woman—the wife of a mutual friend. Koehler had been having an affair with her while her husband was in prison, and McGinn declared that carrying on with a jailed friend’s wife was about the lowest thing a lowlife could do. Koehler came back with the opinion that he was a scumbag himself. Then Koehler spat in McGinn’s face, and the two men were soon out on the sidewalk, where McGinn gave Koehler a severe beating. After that, McGinn went home, and Koehler picked himself up off the pavement and went his own way before returning to Channel Seven. Richie Glennon was still there, and Koehler proposed that they sit down with McGinn, to put their quarrel behind them in a gentlemanly fashion. Glennon thought that was a good idea, and he phoned McGinn to say that they were coming over to his place, which was a block north of Channel Seven, in what the next day’s Newsdescribed as a “luxury apartment building . . . just up the street from Gov. Rockefeller’s New York office.”

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