Book Excerpt: The Millionaire's Wife by Cathy Scott

Today's post is an excerpt from the first chapter of Los Angeles Times bestselling author Cathy Scott’s latest true-crime book, The Millionaire’s Wife: The True Story of a Real Estate Tycoon, is Beautiful Young Mistress, and a Marriage that Ended in Murder. George Kogan, a wealthy businessman, was cut down in broad daylight on an Upper Manhattan sidewalk. It's a fascinating read with lots of twists and turns.

A Cool Manhattan Morning

by Cathy Scott

A light rain fell over Manhattan on a weekday morning like any other. But life can change on a dime, and that’s exactly what happened as middle-aged business tycoon George Kogan hurried back to his ultra-chic Upper East Side apartment with a bag of groceries on each arm in anticipation of break- fasting at home with his young lover. The late morning of Tuesday, October 23, 1990, turned out to be anything but a typical day in the city.

On the busy sidewalk, George, who’d recently celebrated his forty-ninth birthday, turned the corner onto East Sixty- ninth Street and headed toward his mid-block building, between Second and Third. As he hurried down the tree-lined street, he didn’t notice anything unusual other than the cool morning temperature. He continued walking toward the canopied entrance to the co-op where he’d lived for the last two years with Mary-Louise Hawkins, a twenty-eight-year-old rising star in the public relations world. Across the street, carpenters noisily worked on the new Trump Palace high-rise apartment building. A few blocks away, Central Park was alive with pedestrians, bicyclists, and joggers as they coursed through the park’s major arteries to their destinations in New York City, where the drone of urban traffic awaited them. George enjoyed walking the neighborhood. He’d lose himself in the bustling sights and sounds of the city. And this day was no different.

Walking from the neighborhood Food Emporium, he looked forward to spending the late morning with Mary- Louise. Quiet breakfasts were how their relationship had moved from platonic to romantic, and they especially appreciated those moments. Plus, George was anxious to prepare for an afternoon meeting with his son, William, who was acting as mediator to nail down an agreeable divorce settlement with George’s estranged wife, Barbara, and bring to a conclusion the marriage that in essence had ended two years earlier.

As George headed home that morning, William telephoned his father’s apartment to confirm their afternoon appointment. Mary-Louise told him she’d have George return the call when he arrived home from the store. George was optimistic about the settlement and finally getting the lengthy divorce behind him, so he and Mary-Louise could move on with their life together. Also uppermost in George’s mind was settling the divorce to help repair the damaged relation- ship he’d had with William, who had sided with his mother after his parents’ separation.

As George continued his walk home, the usual cast of characters were out and about—nannies pushing babies in strollers, residents leaving their high-rises to walk their dogs, business people hurrying to the subway entrance just steps away. George, distracted with the nagging thought of the afternoon meeting, quickened his pace when his limestone building came into view.

He lived in the heart of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, once called the Silk Stocking District, so named for the attire worn by the rich people who had once lived there. Long gone was the 19th-century farmland, as well as the market and garden districts that had peppered the area. Left were skyscrapers, rows of stylish townhouses, mansions, and the occasional walk-up apartment building.

For a millionaire antiques and art dealer who had once had interests in a casino and several properties in Puerto Rico and New York, George lived a surprisingly modest life on New York’s well-to-do Upper East Side—broadly defined as the area from Fifty-ninth to Ninety-sixth Streets, east of Central Park. His living quarters with Mary-Louise Hawkins were definitely nice, although small, with just one bedroom and a marbled-bath washroom. And while the apartment had a prestigious address with the coveted 10021 zip code in a luxurious high-rise complex, it was not quite up to the elite level of Fifth Avenue, which serves as the symbol of wealthy New York, where George once lived with his now-estranged wife Barbara. Still, he admired the high-end building that housed his current apartment.

The Upper East Side has a legacy of outstanding eclectic architecture, including George’s pre-war apartment. The facade of his co-op, a mix of limestone and beige brick, created a grand entrance with its surround and above-the-door stone molding, with tall arched relief details and shallow columns on either side and carved renaissance-style capitals. Above that was a heavy, stately ornamental stone molding.

The variety of styles added a touch of grace and grandeur from a bygone era. As a connoisseur of fine antiques, George appreciated the artistry that went into the face of the building and enjoyed walking through the double-glass doorway, framed in oak, with its etched Art Deco design. What George could not know was that he would never again walk through that entryway, and the anticipated meeting with his son and his soon-to-be ex-wife to finalize the divorce was not to be. What happened next, he never saw coming.

As he neared the entrance to his Sixty-ninth Street apartment, his face flushed from the damp morning air, what he heard next was startling. It sounded like an explosion, most probably coming from the construction site across the street.

“What the—?” George cried out a nanosecond later, when it dawned on him what the noise really was. It was the distinct sound of gunfire.

No, no, no! he said to himself, and then, Mary-Louise!

The force of the bullets entering George’s back thrust him into a forward dive and catapulted him into the air; he landed in a skid on the rain-soaked concrete. He was face down just yards from his apartment lobby. Seconds felt like minutes.

Coins, bills, and groceries—a carton of eggs, a slab of cheese, a bottle of milk, pieces of fresh fruit—tumbled to the ground, along with George.

Sprawled on the sidewalk next to the wall, with his arms stretched out in front of him amidst the scattered groceries and money, George lifted his head and cried out, “Help me!”

The book is available at bookstores and online at Amazon.com.

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Crimes and Misdemeanors -- and Murder

by Cathy Scott

Journalists by nature are nosy -- and we're chameleons, fading into the background as we observe the happenings around us. I've been to more homicide scenes than I care to count. But once there, I'm all about the details. So, as I've put together a book this past year about the Barbara Kogan case (scheduled for publication in spring 2011), I've been all about the details.


On a rainy October morning in 1990, Kogan's husband George was gunned down by an unknown assailant. From the start, Barbara was a suspect. For nearly two decades, she adamantly denied any involvement. Now 67 years old, she has admitted to playing a part in hiring a hit man to shoot three slugs into George Kogan's back. She said, through her attorney, that she didn't want to put her two sons through the stress of a lengthy trial. She is about to be moved from the Riker's Island jail to a New York prison upstate to serve out a 12-to-36-year sentence.

But the first criminal case I was involved in -- and the reason I became a crime reporter -- wasn't a murder. It was a misdemeanor crime against two friends, my sister and me. As a teenager, I regularly followed crime stories in the local newspaper, and I always was interested in TV news reports, although during that era growing up in San Diego County, there wasn't much crime to speak of.

I lived in La Mesa, a suburb east of San Diego known as the "Jewel of the Hills" with its near-perfect weather and safe neighborhoods, which still have walkable, tree-lined streets. It was a quiet, middle-class, crime-free 'burb -- and a nice place to raise children.

And so it was shocking on one spring night in that same neighborhood when I became a victim along with my sister and two of our friends. And while we were the ones victimized, it was so absurd to us at the time that we laughed -- mostly out of embarrassment.

It happened as we jogged in preparation for a 30-mile benefit walk for hunger -- plus my sister and I were getting swimsuit-ready for Spring Break in Palm Springs. So we took a week-night run as we had dozens of times before. We never felt at risk -- until that night.

We started our run from a cul-de-sac at the end of our block. About two blocks later, a man sitting in a dark-colored Volkswagen Bug stepped out of his car just as we jogged by. The four of us were chatting it up as usual, but it creeped us out enough that we stepped up our pace.

Our route took us a few blocks before turning right, running a few more long blocks, and turning right again to make for a run of a few miles. The last stretch was past a church, then up a hill toward home.

But halfway up the hill, the same man we'd seen blocks earlier stepped out of the darkness and under the light of a street lamp. He was naked from the waist down, with his trousers around his ankles.

It was startling. but we moved so quickly that the man was as shocked as we were. He started running too, away from us, stumbling because his pants were still wrapped around his ankles. He hobbled away while we crossed the street and ran to the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Harris, to call the police. One of my friends, in the meantime, screamed at the top of her lungs, so much so that my sister afterward described it as "screaming and waving her arms hysterically, a la Blanche in Bonnie and Clyde."

It was no exaggeration. And perhaps that was what we all wanted to do that night -- scream -- but didn't. Instead, we giggled. Before that, as a group, we had felt pretty fearless.

When police arrived, two officers asked us direct questions about what we saw, where the man was standing when he dropped his pants, and a good description of the suspect and his car. Then we all went to our respective homes. Within 30 minutes, an officer called and said they had located a suspect and his car. As it turned out, the man lived around the corner from us -- which creeped us out even more -- and his VW was parked in his driveway.

Police needed the four of us to meet them on the street in front of the man's house. So we drove there. Sure enough, standing with the officers was the same man who had earlier exposed himself to us. The man was arrested, and later we were summoned to court for a trial. Outside the courtroom with our mothers, we met the deputy district attorney prosecuting the case. He informed us that the suspect had just pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of lewd conduct.

Thus ended my first involvement with a criminal case. I've been fascinated with criminal law ever since, not as a victim but as a journalist and author. I wouldn't write about that night until many years later; it was hardly a crime worthy of a news story. But for four young women, it was a pivotal moment in time. It stripped away our sense of safety and security in the neighborhood where we'd grown up.

When I eventually became a crime reporter, my habit was to write about the underdog. And for many of their families, what we as reporters put on paper is the last time their loved ones will be written about, so I've always felt it's important to do right by them.

That has been my goal with the George Kogan murder, to tell it like it is and get to the bottom of the story. In a murder-for-hire homicide like his, which has been anything but open-and-shut, sometimes it's tough getting to those crucial details. But in the end, dogged determination usually gets us the facts, documents and interviews we need. 

George Kogan's family, as well as his estranged wife Barbara, the accused and now convicted, should expect nothing less -- the good, the bad and the ugly. Joseph Pulitzer once wrote that journalism is "a noble profession" he'd spent his life doing. While not all would agree with him 100 percent, it's our responsibility, as writers and journalists, to get the story right. George Kogan, shot in the back in broad daylight in October 1990, deserves as much.

Photo of Barbara Kogan courtesy of the New York Post.

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Accused Killers Catch a Break

by Cathy Scott

Two murder cases with women as the accused killers have taken similar -- and unusual -- turns. Each was instantly labeled the “Black Widow.” And both women stood to gain millions should their husbands die.

In the first case, San Juan and Manhattan socialite Barbara Kogan was indicted late last year for the 1990 murder of her millionaire husband George. She stood accused of convincing her attorney to hire a hitman to kill George. Kogan’s estranged husband, with whom she was in the middle of a nasty divorce, was shot to death in broad daylight while George was walking from a neighborhood market to his live-in girlfriend’s high-rise apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Joel Seidemann, the Manhattan assistant district attorney who has been on the case for nearly two decades, is expected to refile a fresh charge against Kogan by the end of this year. During Kogan's arraignment in November 2008, Seidemann described the suspect as "a very angry woman."

"But when that anger became so overwhelming," he told the judge, "she decided to litigate the divorce through the bullets of a gun."

The second defendant is Margaret Rudin, charged and convicted of killing her husband, wealthy real estate investor Ronald Rudin, then driving the body to a remote area on the shore of Lake Mojave 45 miles outside of Las Vegas, stuffing him inside an antique truck and setting it on fire.

The commonalities with the two women, both of whom are now 65 years old, are many. Rudin, who was convicted of murder, has been granted a new trial. Rudin’s conviction was overturned in December 2008 by Clark County District Court Judge Sally Loehrer, who ruled that Rudin, who has spent the last nine years in a Nevada state prison, had “ineffective counsel” during her first trial.

And Barbara Kogan, accused of second-degree murder in the contract killing of her estranged husband, has had the charge dismissed on a technicality. In July, State Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus ruled that because another grand jury had failed to indict Kogan in the 1990s, prosecutors needed judicial permission to empanel a new grand jury that handed down the indictment against Kogan last year. The prosecution, he said, failed to get that permission.

Both women are expected to be in their respective courtrooms on opposite ends of the country sometime next year. Rudin’s first trial, which was much publicized and lasted 10 weeks, was one of Las Vegas's highest profile murder cases. For Kogan, “48 Hours” and “Dateline” have already made arrangements to be in the courtroom for the trial, which is expected to last eight weeks.

While prosecutors in both crimes claim greed as the motive, in the Kogan case, the only evidence against her is circumstantial at best -- unless, by trial time, the prosecution comes up with more.

As for Rudin, it's mostly circumstantial as well, with hard evidence against her shaky. Her husband was missing in 1994, his car found at a strip club. Later, a boy and his father, out fishing together, discovered the burnt trunk and body near the shore of Lake Mojave on the Nevada side of the water. A gun, said to be the murder weapon, found months later in the lake, was not registered to Rudin or her husband, so that connection was never made, just conjectured.

After Rudin was granted a new trial, her new attorney, Christopher Oram, told reporters, "Obviously, we're very happy with the judge's ruling and look forward to going to trial.”

Kogan’s new counsel, high-profile criminal defense lawyer Barry Levin, said he’s looking forward to going to trial as well. “I intend to represent her zealously. I think she will be acquitted,” Levin said.

It all will unfold in their respective courtrooms. For the prosecution, both cases at this juncture appear to be uphill battles. But you never know what might happen as both sides sides duke it out in court.

Photo of Barbara Kogan in court (top) courtesy of the New York Daily News and photo of Margaret Rudin courtesy of TruTV.

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