(Publisher’s Note: This is the seventh chapter of a series of short historical stories that focus on the history of organized crime in Wheeling. A number of eyewitnesses have offered their memories, and interviews were conducted with them and with federal and local officials, including former FBI agent Tom Burgoyne before his passing on January 26, 2023.)
7
Tom Burgoyne, G-Man
He didn’t pound on tables or toss interrogation room chairs. He didn’t have to. He had a gift.
Tom Burgoyne was just 27 years old when J. Edgar Hoover assigned him to the Pittsburgh office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Burgoyne initially worked in the bureau’s Miami detachment, but in 1967, he moved to Wheeling. During his second day, he arranged his office inside the Federal Building on Chapline Street, and on his third day, Burgoyne met a man named Paul Hankish.
Hankish was an individual he was told about by his superiors in Washington, D.C. Hoover knew the name because Hankish had survived the dynamite bombing most believed was ordered by mob boss “Big Bill” Lias in January 1964.
All “Big Bill” allegedly accomplished, though, was blowing off Hankish’s lower extremities resulting in his “Pauly No Legs” nickname, and elevating the man to “folk hero” status throughout the underworld.
Burgoyne and his federal task force teammates only knew him as a street-thug criminal who operated multiple rings and rackets as the boss of the mob. Madames and their prostitutes, thieves and burglars, hijackers and hitmen, and bookies and bar owners all answered to Hankish and his gangsters, and it was Burgoyne’s job to help former U.S. Attorney Bill Kolibash connect the dots.
They started with a two-state case along “the strip” near Chester in Hancock County; next up was the Gallo gang in the Morgantown area; and then Hankish, a well-known mobster with an arrest record as long as his list of connections with organized crimes along the entire East Coast.
“Tom was here in Wheeling before I came back from the military and when we first all met, the FBI was working on a lot of bank robbery cases, and some stolen car cases,” Kolibash explained. “There were some gun cases with the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), and some cases with the IRS over tax cases, and that’s what made up the bulk of the criminal work.
“I don’t want to minimize those kinds of cases, but when we got started with the corruption that was taking place in Hancock County in the late ‘70s, that’s when the job got very interesting,” he explained. “That’s when I started to have a very close relationship with Tom Burgoyne because that’s when we started working side by side for 20 years.”
Once Burgoyne retired from the FBI in 1996 after 33 years with the Bureau, he served two, four-year terms (2000-08) as the Sheriff of Ohio County, was a founding member of the Ohio Valley Cold Case Task Force, and he was hired as an investigator by several local and regional law firms before he passed away nearly a year ago on January 26th.
“After we met at work, we realized our kids were the same age, he was big into sports like I was, and our wives became friends so there was a lot for us to talk about other than the cases we were working on,” Kolibash explained. “Tom was a good man, and he was very good at his job, too. He was terrific with getting suspects and witnesses to talk. I never saw anyone better.
“He was a New England Irishman, and he had the accent and everything,” he recalled. “He loved his Red Sox and all his Boston teams, and he really loved the game of baseball. And when it came to doing his job, you always got what we needed when it came to information. Tom wasn’t the quickest when it came to the paperwork, but he did the job better than most did.
“There’s a picture in the book of Tom and I coming out of the courthouse, and I think that exemplifies the relationship.”
‘People Were Getting Hurt’
Freddy Lynn was the center fielder for Burgoyne’s beloved Boston Red Sox for six ultra-successful seasons in the late 1970s, and he was a Gold Glover in the field and the American League batting champion in 1979.
Of course, Burgoyne loved Lynn, and Kolibash believes that’s why the FBI agent pulled a prank on the former prosecutor and his staff while the outfielder was having yet another All-Star season.
“There was a time when he told us at the office that Freddy Lynn’s team jacket was stolen, and that he was going to look into it. He told us he was going to see what he could find out that the investigators didn’t,” Kolibash recalled. “A couple of weeks later, Tom showed up at the office with a Freddy Lynn jacket. He never said anything about it. We asked, but he never said anything.
“He had that kind of sense of humor,” he remembered. “But his focus was immediate when it came to the job. His smile went away, and he went to work. He had that switch.”
Before Hankish ultimately was sentenced to 33.5 years in federal prison in October 1990, he had served time in the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville and in the Marin County Jail in Fairmont.
“Pauly No Legs” was notorious, and he enjoyed the notoriety that came with it.
Burgoyne often told tales about seeing Hankish at Ernie’s Esquire, the finest supper club in the Wheeling area, and how the mob boss would send drinks to him, and he’d send them right back. While Hankish enjoyed making grand entrances when arriving at the eatery, Burgoyne, too, made it quite obvious in public whose team he was on.
The man, after all, coached softball and baseball with his FBI badge positioned on his belt and in plain sight.
“I don’t think Tom had a start time and a finishing time when it came to his job, and he could pick up a conversation with you exactly where you left it off with him. By the time we got started with the Hankish case, Tom was married to his wife, Kathy, and he was a great father to his children, but he was always working the case like I was,” Kolibash said. “It was on his mind for sure.
“Organized crime was a pretty normal thing in and around Wheeling because of the gambling and the prostitution, but Hankish upped the game with the drugs and the murders. Tom knew that,” he recalled. “People were getting hurt.”
Burgoyne’s superpower was communication and an example of it was mentioned by former U.S. Attorney William Wilmoth in what he told the media soon after the former sheriff’s passing.
“I would put him on the stand, every time I got a chance. He would look at me and listen to my questions. And then he would turn to the jury and tell them the answer. And they were mesmerized because he was just so such a wonderful, wonderful guy,” Wilmoth told the Wheeling newspapers. “We had a series of cases from Hancock County that involved charges of political corruption. And I had Tom on the stand and a high-powered criminal defense attorney from Pittsburgh said to me, I think in jest, that he thought that it was some sort of constitutional violation for me to always put Tom Burgoyne on the witness stand.”
Kolibash saw it, and he used it, too.
“Tom had a personality that allowed him to get information from a witness or suspect very effectively. He was very persuasive, and he did everything the proper way, and that carried over when he was on the witness stand. He always had a tremendous rapport with the jury,” Kolibash said. “Tom was a man who could relate to everyone, and that included the bad guys. Plus, he was a fairly large, stocky individual too, which kind of gave him that good ole ‘G-Man look. And it worked.
“When we were working the cases against Hankish and his operations, there wasn’t any of the physical intimidation during interrogations. I know that’s what most people see on TV, but that’s not the reality I remember,” he said. “Tom didn’t need to do that stuff anyway, and even if he tried, those guys wouldn’t have cared because they were never going to cooperate with us anyway.”
Open the Refrigerator
Raids were taking place, gang members were getting arrested, and newspaper reporters were telling a story about an organization crumbling piece by piece.
Drug dealers were squealing, prostitutes were singing, and the evidence was overwhelmingly against the bad guys. There also was a rumor floating around downtown Wheeling in the late 1980s that Hankish put a hit out on Kolibash and Burgoyne.
“But we heard that one of Hankish’s enforcers, Jesse Anderson, stopped it. We heard it was Jesse who thought that would cross the line, and that was a guy who did a lot of bad things while working for Hankish,” Kolibash explained. “We never knew if it was all true; that’s just what some of our people told us.
“The murders that took place happened outside of Wheeling; the ones that we know about anyway,” he said. “They were in the Pittsburgh area, in Uniontown; up there because the bigger gambling stuff spread that far. And some things turned out pretty bad sometimes.”
Those realities didn’t stop Burgoyne from having some fun from time to time even if it meant portraying a nun known as “Sister Aloysius,” a strict, Catholic school disciplinarian in the play and movie “Doubt.”
“We would have different social events in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and when someone was getting to retire, we’d have a party for them,” Kolibash explained. “Well, when we had those gatherings, Tom would dress up like Sister Aloysius and do an impersonation of a nun during the party. We didn’t know where he got the nun outfit, but it was hilarious every single time.
“Tom played the spoons, and the big joke that every time the refrigerator opened, he was going to play us a new song,” he said. “He always picked the right times to lift morale.”
While Paul Nathaniel Hankish passed away in May 1998 at 66 years old, Burgoyne and his wife enjoyed many years in retirement being involved with community-driven causes and events. Tom lost Kathy when she passed away on September 7, 2018, but he remained active in the community.
Youth Services System, in fact, honored Burgoyne in April 2021 as its Good Samaritan of the Year.
“Tom was a tremendous asset to our community, and it’s been about a year since he passed so I’ve been thinking about him a lot. We have a chapter in the book about Tom and his role in what we were able to accomplish, but also because there were two aspects to him – he was the investigator, and he was the man who liked to be social out of the office because he loved his community.
“His wife, Kathy, was from here and they raised their kids here,” he said. “He always made his trips back to Massachusetts, but he loved Wheeling and everything about it.”
During his three decades with the FBI, Burgoyne investigated much more than organized crime and a big-leaguers baseball jacket, and that includes the rape and murder of Sister Robin, a young lady from the Fulton area of Wheeling who was preparing to become a nun at Mount St. Joseph just outside of Oglebay Park’s campus.
Roberta Elam was her full name, and sadly she was discovered motionless during the morning hours of June 13, 1977. It was determined the 26-year-old was raped and murdered while meditating in a remote area of the grounds. A number of law enforcement agencies were involved with the investigation, and it remains unsolved and one of Ohio County’s most infamous cold cases.
After he was elected as Ohio County Sheriff in 2000, Burgoyne took another look, and his detectives concluded that investigators only needed one more piece of evidence – the perpetrator’s DNA – and the case could be closed. That, however, has not yet happened.
“Of course, Tom wanted to solve every case he had and the (Sister Robin) case was no different. He wanted to give her family the closure they wanted,” recalled Kolibash, who will be releasing his book, “Justice Never Rests” in two weeks. “He was the same way with everyone involved with the cases related to the Hankish organization, too, and I know he told (mob hitman) Jimmy Griffin that he was going to ‘get him’ one day and put him away.
“Griffin usually shrugged off what Tom said back then, but Tom and I went to a prison up in Pittsburgh where Jimmy was in jail for murder (in the late 1980s). We wanted to see if he’d give us any more on Hankish since he was probably gone for good, but he refused to tell us anything. He’d never talk to us,” the former federal prosecutor recalled. “But then Jimmy looked over at Tom and said, ‘Guess you got me like you always said you would.’”
The Series:
(Author’s Note: Each week I’ll be sharing a link to one of the chapters of my first “Wheeling Mob” series I wrote while serving as the founding editor-in-chief of Weelunk, a digital media site now owned and operated by Wheeling Heritage, a non-profit organization that promotes the history and heritage of the city of Wheeling.)
