My father, the hitman
I knew that my father was a tough guy who was often on the run or in prison, said author James Dolan in D Magazine. But it was only after he was murdered that I discovered just how dangerous he was.
MY DAD HAD gotten out of prison, and, for the first time in years, we were sitting down to dinner. It turned out to be the last time I ever saw him alive.
This was 1984. We were at Newport’s, in Dallas’ West
End, drinking Anchor Steam beers, and the mood was one of celebration. A former light heavyweight boxer, my dad was still physically imposing, even at 70 years old, but he was slimmer after his most recent stint inside. His sports coat hung loose on him, and his red-blond hair had thinned.
His name was James Dolan, same as mine, but everyone called him Doc. He’d been in and out of my life since I was a boy, but when I was in my early 30s, Doc and I reconnected. That night, we discussed his most recent bust for a threecard monte scam he pulled in Memphis before twice jumping bail. From there, he got to talking about the Dallas Campisi family, Italian restaurateurs who had a reputation for being in the Mafia. He talked about Jack Ruby, how some said he was a mafioso, too, how Ruby had “really wanted to be seen as a tough guy.”
Being around Doc felt like being in a closed space with a circus tiger. It was exciting because there was a real danger, more than I realized for most of my life. A few weeks before we met at Newport’s, he’d taken me to a bank and had me open a safe deposit box we could share. He showed me roughly $30,000 in cash, the most money I’d ever seen in one place. He said I could take from the box as needed, but he told me not to “hit it too hard.”
That night at Newport’s, he asked me about the house I’d recently bought in Oak Cliff. Unprompted, he said that if there ever came a time I couldn’t make the mortgage payment, I could “put it in the sky.” I asked him what he meant. “Like that little house in Miami,” he said. “I put it in the sky.”
I realized he was referring to the house fire that had prompted our family to move away from Miami in the early ’50s. My mother sometimes made vague comments about my father having something to do with it, but now here he was, the man himself, talking about the house he’d torched.
He also told me how much he loved my mother, still, but felt she’d turned my brother and sister and me against him. The fact that he carried a torch for my mother after all those years of life on the road in motels, hooker cribs, hideouts, and prison cells brought a surge of sadness I feared would spill right there in the car. I remember him driving away into the darkness. A few weeks after Newport’s, I got a call informing me that Doc had been shot dead at his apartment in San Antonio.
ON DEC. 4, 1984, I was alone in the house, having just taken my 4-yearold son to his day care. I needed to gather up some things before leaving for work in North Dallas. The phone rang. I picked up.
“Hello, Jimmy?” said a man’s voice. The caller introduced himself as Sam and said he was a friend of my dad’s. He sounded friendly, like I knew him, but I didn’t. Sam was calling to tell me that Doc had been murdered at the door of his apartment that morning. Sam said there were no witnesses but that word was Doc had been killed by two associates with whom he’d been robbing drug dealers at gunpoint. It seems these two had figured it would be easier to rob a 70-year-old man than it would be to rob the young dealers. And, Sam said, Doc had about $50,000 in his apartment, but it was gone. He knew who the guys were, and he said he and his friends were “gonna get the motherf---ers.” When he hung up, I rested my head on the kitchen table and cried like a lost child.
The call kicked off what has become a 37-year search for truth and understanding. I wanted to know more about Doc’s life, all the parts I’d never been shown or couldn’t comprehend at the time. I wanted to understand this man, why he made the choices he had. And, of course, I wanted to know who’d killed him.
About a week later, I got a call from Richard Urbanek, a San Antonio PD homicide detective, requesting that I come down to go through Doc’s apartment with him.
A faint metallic scent of blood mixed with an undertone of rot hit my nose as we entered Doc’s efficiency pad. My father’s blood, I thought. My blood. It struck me as more of a cell than a home. There was no art. A small table near a twin bed held a portable color TV. Against a wall, there was a wooden drying rack with T-shirts and underwear still hanging. Elsewhere, a stack of paperbacks, copies of The Ring magazine, an ashtray with a cigar stub. On his dresser sat a mix of matchbooks, paper scraps with nameless phone numbers, keys, eyeglasses. I was shocked to see syringes and ampules of scopolamine, a powerful hallucinogen sometimes used in kidnappings in Latin American countries.
I spotted a small black-and-white photo with one corner missing. In the frame was a fat baby astride a pit bull terrier, with a young, dark-haired woman holding him
steady. The baby was me, the woman my mother, and the dog may well have been Lady Girl, Doc’s favorite dog. He had carried the photo with him for more than 30 years, through prisons, jails, motel rooms. A lump formed in my throat and wouldn’t let go. If you loved us so much, Doc, why did you leave?
When I was about 9, Lady Girl had a litter in our garage. Doc had taken an interest in dogfighting and had bred her with that in mind, but he said I could have one of the pups, a sturdy brindle male I called Billy. Billy grew to become a powerful animal. I recall taking Billy to Kiest Park for training sessions that involved Billy harnessed to a rope that Doc held as he sat behind the wheel of our blue Ford coupe. Billy ran alongside the car, pulling us slowly, panting and foaming at the mouth with the effort. He never quit. At some point, Doc decided to take Billy on a car trip “just to see how he’ll do.” He returned without Billy and told me the dog had “gotten in a fight” and was hurt so badly that he had to be killed.
IN MAY 1985, a lawyer called to tell me probate was complete on Doc’s estate, which amounted to a brown paper bag holding $45,000 in cash, a Seiko watch, a cheap ring, and some odds and ends. The lawyer asked if I had seen the San Antonio newspaper. “They did a big article on your dad’s murder,” he said.
The front page of the Express-News from May 19, 1985, bore the headline “Man Slain in S.A. Tied to JFK Assassination.” Near the headline was a picture of Doc wearing tinted glasses. On the inner pages were photos of Carlos Marcello, Felix Alderisio, and Santo Trafficante. Marcello and Trafficante were thought by some in law enforcement to have ordered the hit on JFK. For the first time, I felt like I could see behind the curtain that my father used to hide his life. The Express-News story connected Doc to Jack Ruby and tied him to a JFK conspiracy theory. The reporter, Bill Hendricks, wrote that Doc had done collections work for these top mafiosi.
When he was killed, according to the newspaper article, Doc was a key witness in a probe of South Texas drug dealing and contract murder. The investigation was code named Operation Bushmaster, and just hours before he was killed, he’d negotiated through his attorneys for immunity from federal prosecution in exchange for his testimony before a grand jury. According to the story, “Six 9 mm bullets pumped into Dolan late last year put the grand jury out of business.” That jolted me. It seemed logical that his murder had been a hit. In fact, a detective was quoted in the story saying, “...it doesn’t appear the motive was burglary or robbery.”
I thought back to my conversation with the man calling himself Sam. Why did he tell me it was a robbery? Was Sam in on it? Had I actually spoken to the man who had murdered my father?
Late in 2019, I finally received Doc’s heavily redacted FBI file. It is 1,500 pages covering only the years 1971 through 1978, when he was on the lam after pulling a swindle in Memphis. I’d already been warned about some of what I’d find. Doug Swanson, a former Dallas Morning News reporter and author of Blood Aces, a book about the famous hoodlum Benny Binion, had called me earlier, trying to verify information he had uncovered related to the 1972 Las Vegas car-bombing death of attorney William Coulthard. Binion had wanted Coulthard taken out. The likely bomber? Doc Dolan.
Working through Doc’s FBI files, I eventually found something that stopped me cold. I came across a narrative of Doc attending a cockfight in the Trinity River bottoms near Northwest Highway in 1973. An informant placed him there and implicated him in the murder of two men who were also there and had stolen a moneymaking dog from an associate of Doc’s a week prior. Their bodies were found on New Year’s Eve at a campground on the Elm Fork of the Trinity, with gunshot wounds to their heads and their hands bound behind them with neckties. Somehow the Coulthard bombing seemed abstract, while this cockfight scenario seemed too real to me and churned my stomach. Doc was a murderer.
Earlier this year, I answered a call while driving. A woman with a deep country accent was on the other end. She reminded me that her daddy and Doc had once been the closest of friends. I remembered her daddy’s name from childhood. She was drunk and rambling. She described herself and her family as Mafia. I was wondering what the nature of the call was when she blurted out, “I think my daddy kilt your daddy, cuz I think he was afraid with that big investigation that Doc would testify on what all we was up to.” I assumed she was talking about Operation Bushmaster.
ONE NIGHT AFTER a few beers, Doc told me a story about a machine he once sold to suckers. This machine, with the turn of a crank, would print perfect $100 bills. Thing was, it didn’t really print them. The machine spit out bills that had been loaded into it before its demonstration, just enough to convince the buyer. He told me the marks paid big bucks for a counterfeit counterfeiting machine.
Did the machine actually exist? I don’t know. But his pantomime of how it worked was believable, and, what’s more, I wanted to believe it—in the same way I wanted to believe when I was a kid that Davy Crockett killed a bear with his bare hands.
Telling the story, his eyes sparkled with mirth while I filled with pride and laughed along with him. But beneath the laughter and the shame-shaded pride, I was sad. No, it was something else: pity. This brilliant, witty, handsome, charismatic man had accomplished nothing. He left his wife to raise his children on her own while he roamed the country committing murders, arson, armed robbery, and who knows what else.
I’ve wandered for years in the mirror palace of my father’s life, always driven by the idea that I’d eventually arrive at the final truth, and here it was sitting in plain sight: Everyone in his life was a mark, with something in his or her heart that made him or her vulnerable to his con.
I might be the only buyer there ever was for the counterfeit counterfeiting machine, its first and best customer. I openly admit I bought the con, and I knew it was the only way to be close to Doc. For all the trouble it has caused me, all the PTSD, the night terrors in childhood, the harassment by the FBI—all of it—I have no regrets. Because I am still his mark. As I type these lines, I am still searching to understand him. And the search will go on.
Adapted from an article that originally appeared in D Magazine. Used with permission.