|Photo by Emma Delk| Former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia William Kolibash has penned “Justice Never Rests,” a book detailing cases from his 20 years spent prosecuting crime at the federal level.
From convicting the notorious “Godfather” of midwestern crime Paul Hankish to bringing down the murderous Swami Bhaktipada of the Hare Krishna movement, former U.S. Attorney William Kolibash recounts 20 years spent prosecuting crime in West Virginia and beyond in “Justice Never Rests.”
The book opens with Kolibash’s retelling of opening a makeshift bomb sent in an envelope to the original Federal Building and Post Office in Wheeling by Rodney Moore, a criminal waiting for federal charges in jail in Ohio County.
From there, the book delves into the various battles Kolibash waged against organized crimes, drug kingpins and cults as an attorney in the Northern District of West Virginia. Kolibash began his career in the Northern District as an assistant U.S. attorney and was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and approved by the U.S. Senate to be the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia in 1982.
Over the two decades spent in the office, Kolibash prosecuted a variety of crimes and criminals, from old-school moonshiners to violent Jamaican posses.
Moore is one of the various criminal characters who have remained fresh in Kolibash’s mind since he began writing the book a year ago. Moore fashioned the bomb sent to the courthouse out of paraphernalia from the prison commissary. Kolibash said the accelerant for the butane lighter in the bomb not working was what prevented his head from being “blown off” when he opened the letter.
“Moore was one of the two defendants that were the scariest and most evil that I had prosecuted, and there was a whole list of things he was certainly capable of,” Kolibash said. “He was one of these guys capable of killing high-level federal officials, so that’s how the book starts.”
The other defendant Kolibash named as the “scariest” was Thomas Drescher, who was the hitman for Bhaktipada, the co-founder of the Hare Krishna community in Marshall County, New Vrindaban. Drescher was convicted for the murder of Stephen Bryant and Charles St. Denis in support of the Swami.
“The Swami indoctrinated a lot of people there [New Vrindaban], and I interviewed quite a number of them,” Kolibash said. “Swami was able to take advantage of people, and he was very abusive with the women members. That was a big motivation for the murders, because once certain members of the community found out how abusive Swami was and got upset, he wanted to suppress that.”
Another notable major case Kolibash unpacks is the Hankish prosecution. Beginning in the 1970s, Hankish ran the criminal circuit in Wheeling.
“Everybody knew Paul Hankish, going back from day one,” Kolibash said. “Hankish was at the top and had lieutenants, the ones who ran the gambling operations and hitmen.”
Due to the infamy of the Swami and Hankish cases, Kolibash was often approached by people telling him he should write a book based on his experiences as a U.S. attorney. Kolibash put this idea into action a year ago when he became acquainted with a fellow Brown University graduate, real crime and thriller author Jon Land, a co-author of the book.
“When I left the U.S. Attorney’s Office, my staff put together a book called ‘The Trilogy,’ which outlined all the major cases that we had and were of historical significance,” Kolibash said. “I sent that to Jon, and he said, ‘This is great. These are exactly the things that I like to write about.’”
Kolibash also teamed up with his daughter, Shariane “Sherry” Kolibash Taylor, a corporate attorney in Pittsburgh, to write the book when she expressed interest in helping him.
With his co-writing team assembled, Kolibash dove into research for the various cases he prosecuted as an attorney, using his files from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, court briefs, court filings and media coverage of the cases.
“I would do some research, put together documents of information and send it to John and Sherry,” Kolibash said. “John would write a chapter and send it to me and Sherry to edit.”
Beyond recounting the various trials and tribulations of his time as a U.S. Attorney, Kolibash said the book can serve as a learning tool for the legal field.
Kolibash’s team at the U.S. Attorney’s office pioneered using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute to bring criminals to justice. Kolibash said the statute allowed his prosecution team to combine the offenses of corrupt organizations committing multiple crimes.
“For instance, in the Hankish case, you had gambling, murders and extortion,” Kolibash said. “All of these are combined in one indictment and are predicate offenses, which you can combine all of them as long as they’re under the auspices of an organization. An organization could be anything, like Hankish’s crime group, so we used that statute to accomplish that, which had not been used very frequently in federal prosecutions at that point.”
Kolibash was also the first U.S. attorney to use multi-jurisdictional task forces and investigative grand juries. Kolibash noted that through the collaboration of state, local and federal officials, the pyramid-like structure of organized crime groups in the area could be mapped out clearly.
“We were able to pick out the weak spots in those structures,” Kolibash said. “It could be a disgruntled employee, group member or a spouse or girlfriend. You start calling those people for the grand jury and developing your case because you won’t get cooperation from the higher levels in the organization.”
Kolibash is making the book available as an educational aid, particularly for its coverage of criminal law cases. He said the book can be utilized as a textbook, with one of its themes being “how you conduct an investigation.”
In addition to being a learning tool, Kolibash believes the book can serve as a trip down memory lane for Ohio Valley residents who were around during the major criminal happenings in the area during the 1970s and 1980s. For those who came after that era, Kolibash said the book provides a snapshot of a time when illegal gambling operations and prostitution gave the Friendly City a “loose” reputation.
“Everyone knew about gambling back then, you’d have the football spot sheets and the machines that would be raided every once in a while,” Kolibash said. “The ironic thing is now everything illegal that these people were doing from a gambling standpoint back in the day is legal now through the state.”
Kolibash’s time spent “putting away” the kingpins of criminal organizations had long-lasting impacts on the state. He noted that when criminal figures such as Hankish were removed from a community, no one could replace them as they were “home-grown organizations.”
“As Hankish got older, he had more influence and contacts in the community, so it was a home-grown crime organization,” Kolibash said. “If you take the people out of that home-grown organization connected to the community, there’s no one to replace them.”
“Justice Never Rests: A U.S. Attorney’s Battle against Murderers, Drug Lords, Mob Kingpins & Cults” will be available at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Amazon.com and other retailers beginning Jan. 28.
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