(^36) The last word
My father, the hitman
James^Dolan(^2
)mother sometimes made vague comments
about my father having something to do
with it, but now here he was, the man him-
self, 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 remem-
ber 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.O
N DEC. 4, 1984, I was alone in the
house, having just taken my 4-year-
old 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 hadbeen murdered at the door
of his apartment that morn-
ing. 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 understand-
ing. 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 homi-
cide 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 kidnap-
pings 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 himI 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.The author as an infant, with Doc Dolan in Chicago, 1952M
Y 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 three-
card monte scam he pulled in
Memphis before twice jumping
bail. From there, he got to talking about
the Dallas Campisi family, Italian restau-
rateurs 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