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 train-
ing 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.
I
N 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 con-
nected Doc to Jack Ruby and tied him to
a JFK conspiracy theory. The reporter, Bill
Hendricks, wrote that Doc had done collec-
tions 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 immu-
nity 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
The last word^37
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,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.O
NE 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 per-
fect $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 counterfeit-
ing 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, hand-
some, charismatic man had accomplished
nothing. He left his wife to raise his chil-
dren 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.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 eventu-
ally 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 bomb-
ing 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 remindedDoc kept this photo of his son with Lady Girl for 30 years.