Baltimore

The convoluted killing of John Owens

The murder of John Owens, and the related murders of Carvel K. Hatfield, Joseph Grieco, Philip A. Fiorino and David Long is a display of Baltimore’s underbelly from an age gone by and were it not for the senseless loss of life, the case would almost be a dark comedy on how not to murder someone.

On November 22,1970, an electrical contractor named John E. Owens, 38, got a call that his electrical shop had been firebombed. The bombing was a way t get Owens to leave the safety of his house. When he returned from the bombing scene, he was gunned down with two shotgun blasts as he stepped out of his car in front of his home in the 4600 block Manordene Road in Southwest Baltimore. The shotgun blasts him in the chest and stomach. He was dead on arrival at a nearby hospital.

A year and a half before, on June 11, 1969, three neatly dressed men, pretending to be detectives forced their way into Owens apartment and unloaded four bullets into him hitting him in the neck, and hands and then left him for dead. Before that, Owens was flagged down on the Beltway by a motorist who fired several shots at him but missed.

A few months later, Wayne Owens, John’s brother, fled Baltimore in fear for his life. explaining that someone had called his unlisted phone and said, “You and Grant are next.” When the caller hung up, Owens looked out the window to the front of his house and noticed that his car was gone. It was found later in the day, burned, in a nearby town.

Acting on a tip that killing was done as a Murder-for-Hire, Baltimore homicide detectives worked with the New York City police department to identify two New York Mafia figures considered possible suspects in the murder, both of whom were known as hitmen for hire. Police were vague on the details but did mention that one of the men was related to the head of a New York Mob Family. The Baltimore police also knew that the two hoods frequented a bar in Coney Island, which meant they were part of the Colombo Crime Family. That angle came to nothing.

Then, acting on information from police informants, on August 3, 1969, Owen’s estranged wife, Josephine, was arrested for plotting her husband’s murder. Indicted with her was Edward F. Mallon, a 28-year-old longshoreman; Gordon “Snapper” Williams, 31, Frank M. Watts, Jr., 29 and Rose Bowers, alias Rose Hill. Excluding Mallon, the group was charged with conspiring to murder John Owens and for conspiring to violate the forgery laws in printing counterfeit checks. The forgery and counterfeit charges stem from a raid earlier this month on-premises in the 3200 block St. Paul street, where police seized hundreds of counterfeit check forms, check paper, printer's type, and photographic development equipment.

Gordon R. “Snapper” Williams was sentenced to 15 years in state prison. Williams, Frank E. Watts, 29, pleaded guilty to assault with intent to murder and was also was given a 15-year sentence. Edward F. Mallon, 28, was ruled innocent by reason of insanity and was confined to a secured section of a state mental institution.

Edward Francis Mallon was a one-man crime wave. Born in Philadelphia but raised in Towson, a city just outside of Baltimore was accused of conspiring with or soliciting others to murder a Baltimore Police Sargent named Stephen Tabelirtg, who had been hot on Mallon’s trail as well as plotting to murder Fred K. Grant, assistant state's attorney. Grant and Charles E. Moylan, Jr., the state's attorney for Baltimore city and were conducting a large investigation into the murder for hire plot.

In 1965, Mallon was arrested and charged with the murder of Philip A. Fiorino, whose bullet-riddled body was found in a Baltimore county ditch on August 28, 1965. He was shot once in the chest at close range and twice in the head.

Two days before Fiorino's murder, Carvel K. Hatfield, an official in the bricklayers union was gunned down in the doorway of his North Baltimore home. Guido Iozzi, Jr., then president of the Baltimore Trades Council, was accused of conspiring to hire Fiorino to kill Hatfield.

The state's theory was that Mallon was brought in to clean up the connection between Fiorino and Iozzi. The case was brought to trial, but Mallon was acquitted when a key witness refused to testify during a trial. Iozzi was eventually found guilty on federal charges of labor racketeering and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Mallon was also accused in a murder-for-hire plot to end the life of a man named Joseph Grieco, the manager of the Miami nightclub on Baltimore’s once-notorious Block, an area filled with strip clubs and prostitutes.

Grieco and his wife had moved to Baltimore to several years before from Chicago where he was a minor player in Organized Crime, working mostly as a loan shark under his cousin, Joey Grieco, an underworld power on Chicago West Side.

The move to Baltimore didn’t take Joseph Grieco out of the mob, if anything, it dragged him further into it. A few days after he was murdered, a large number of bar owners on Baltimore slimy Block and known gamblers were subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury impaneled by Richard E. Moylan, Baltimore state's attorney who was looking into Grieco’s activities in an interstate white slave racket that also involved members of the Chicago Mob who were operating of the city of Cicero.

Aside from his mobster cousin, Joseph Grieco’s father was Julius “Juju” Grieco, a soldier in the Chicago mob who committed suicide in Florida in 1984. (He had all but lost a battle to cancer.)

Juju Griego made a fortune as an iron-fisted and much-feared pimp and porn salesman on Chicago’s West Side. In 1960, Juju was indicted for stealing more than $250,000 in overcharges from patrons to his strip club, the Show Lounge. When prosecutors requested Juju police record, which dated back to a murder charge in 1930, the were told that his records had vanished from the Chicago Police file system.

On March 20, 1969, Grieco, 38, was shot to death when three men forced their way into his car. Grieco had been shot behind the right ear, in the lower back and left wrist, probably with a 45-caliber automatic. He had been dead three or four hours on a quiet residential street when his body was discovered at 7.30 A.M. the following day by a passerby.

There were no weapons found in Greco’s bloody car, but investigators did find "two $10 bags of marijuana" in the glove compartment. They also noticed that Greco’s body had a fresh needle mark on one arm but no old scars from other needles. He didn’t carry a wallet and less than a dollar in change was found in his pocket. A check on his phone lines showed that Grieco has made an extraordinary number of calls to Chicago in the days just before he was killed. The police also learned that Grieco, once a ranking middleweight boxer who fought under the name Johnny Grecco, had gotten into a shuffle with four men in the week past and suffered a slight injury.

Grieco’s wife, a stripper professionally known as “Ginger” (Her given name was Melba Jean Grieco) was one of the three licensees of the Miami Club, had been missing for a month. Grieco had bought the bar in 1967 with Jacob Cohen, Melba Jean Grieco and Angelo Munafo and Angelo Glonoso. Just days before her husband was killed, Ginger Grieco had received $61,000 for the sale of the Minami Nite Club from the city. The Miami was later razed by the city to make way for, of all things, a new police station. But the club was scheduled to reopen near North Gay street.

Angelo Munafo, another investor in the Miami was a member of the legendary Baltimore Crew, a faction of the Gambino crime family, now extinct, that once ran the Baltimore port. Munafo, a made member of the Gambino’s, had married well into the Crew’s leadership. He was a business partner of Julius “The Lord” Salisbury, head of Baltimore’s large Jewish mob, in several handbooks as well as money laundering. They were probably partners in the Oasis Nite Club on the Block.

Almost immediately after Grieco’s body was found, the police picked up one of his business partners, Leonard J. Ciaccio, who was also from Chicago and held him for questioning.

Ciaccio admitted that he and Grieco had left a bar, the Carousel, but that as they walked to their car, three men overpowered them and forced them into his car and drove off into the night. He said that he watched the men murder Grieco and that the killers then let him off with a warning not tell the police what he had seen.

The cops, of course, didn’t buy Ciaccio’s ridiculous story and charged him Grieco's murder. The state eventually dropped the case. However, in 1973, Ciaccio was convicted of illegal possession of a gun silencer and for tax avoidance concerning another dive he owned in Baltimore.

Police suspected that Mallon, who was hired to murder John Owns, hired the actual killer in the case, Gordon Snapper Williams, who also murdered John Owen’s, to murder Grieco. Exactly why they killed the powerfully connected Grieco isn’t known. He had either stolen from the mob or had turned snitch. One of those two things, combined with his suspected heroin addiction, would be enough reason for the Mob to kill him.

As for Josephine Owens, the wife, she was never brought to trial after the state's star witness, David W. Long, 28, a gas station operator, was shot to death, two shotgun blasts to the head as he parked his tow truck behind his home on Patapsco Avenue, on June 21, 1970.

Three witnesses reported seeing a white Chevrolet sped away after the shooting at 12.19 A.M. Long had apparently reached for a .32-caliber pistol before he murdered, the gun was found on the seat inches away from him.

Josephine, named for her grandmother, Josephine Farace, was the sole beneficiary of her husband's will, which was said to control extensive and valuable real estate holding and cash. The state argued that Josephine Owens plotted to murder her husband rather than have the assets of the marriage reduced by splitting them between the couple.

Not that John Owens was above the fray either. Early on the day he was killed, Owens had been arrested on arson charges in connection with a fire at his summer home in Pasadena, a town in nearby Ann Arundel county, south of Baltimore. The charge was procuring and counseling to commit arson and procuring and counseling to commit arson to defraud an insurance company.

The police report stated that own had recruited to men, Wayne S. Ludwig and Thomas J. Corcoran, to burglarize and then set fire to his 4-story frame house in the Venice-On-The-Bay community. However, the fire fizzled and only caused about $3,500 damage to the attic and to a bedroom before the fire department arrived. When the plot behind the fire became known, the local police also charged Owen with being an accessory to a burglary, and with falsifying a report to police.

In 197o, Charles Battaglia, Josephine’s father, a used car dealer and poultry salesman was arrested and convicted of killing David W. Long, the state’s star witness against his daughter. The shot used in the murder was found, busted apart and sunk in mud, in a creek less than a quarter of a mile from Battaglia’s home.

The actual murderer, Robert Koch admitted to killing Long for Charles Battaglia for $5000 to keep him from testifying against his daughter. In 1974, Battaglia was given a new trial based on a legal technicality. A jury found him guilty in the murder of the state’s witness, however, due to another legal somersault, that conviction was dismissed in 1976.

Josephine Battaglia Owens moved to Tampa Florida and married a man named Robert Frank Easton in 1975 in Rockingham, Virginia