Mob biography reopens investigation on 1981 homicide
By Jillian Duchnowski - jduchnowski@nwherald.com
A Wonder Lake woman thinks she discovered who killed her father’s close friend and her former bus driver 27 years ago.
Armed with her father’s suspicions, Holly Hager did a few Internet searches on a convicted murderer from McHenry and found an excerpt from a mob associate’s biography that loosely described the 1981 double homicide in a Lakemoor bar.
She drove to Gurnee to get a copy of Frank Cullotta’s 2007 biography, which details several mob-related burglaries and slayings before Cullotta became a government witness in 1982 to avoid his own prosecution.
Cullotta didn’t name the victims. But he stated that his partner-in-crime, Larry Neumann, told him he shot two people in McHenry County to avenge a perceived slight involving his ex-wife.
“After I read it, I was still for a minute,” Hager said. “After all these years, people didn’t know who did it.”
Her sisters brushed her off when she told them she had solved the crime, but her sister Heidi called McHenry County Sheriff’s detectives to tell them about the book.
They reopened the case. About four months later, authorities are releasing little about their efforts other than that they hope to reach a conclusion soon. Neumann died in January 2007.
“I don’t know that it will bring peace to the survivors,” Undersheriff Gene Lowery said. “I do feel bad that it wasn’t more successful sooner, but I want to make sure from our perspective – today looking back over two decades – that we do the best we can now.”
A bloody discovery
On June 1, 1981, Ronald Scharff, 36, owned P.M. Pub on what is now a parking lot next to the Lakemoor Village Hall, 234 W. Rand Road. Patricia Freeman, 32, was a newly hired bartender with two children; she also was Holly Hager’s bus driver when the girl was in junior high.
On June 2, 1981, Freeman’s two nieces came looking for Freeman and, along with Scharff’s wife, Kathleen, found the pair dead in a living room attached to the tavern about 11 a.m., according to newspaper reports from the time.
Detectives ruled robbery out as a motive because a “substantial amount” of money was found at the bar, according to local newspaper reports from 1981. Then-Capt. George Hendle, who eventually became the sheriff, told the media then that the victims died of gunshot wounds to the chest.
Hager’s father, Jim, helped Kathleen run the bar for a few years after the deaths, at one point living in the attached apartment and sleeping with a gun on the couch in the room where the bodies were discovered, Holly Hager said.
Jim Hager hosted a benefit for Scharff’s three sons — who were ages 10, 8 and 2 when the homicides happened — the next summer. The initials of the elder two sons, Paul and Mike, had inspired the bar’s name.
Not long after the slayings, Jim Hager thought police might suspect him because he had exchanged vehicles with Ron Scharff shortly before he died, intending to fix parts on Scharff’s vehicle, Holly Hager said. So, his car was seen at Scharff’s house and bar the night of the slayings, but Scharff had been using it, Holly Hager and Paul Scharff said.
Jim Hager told detectives they should either look at Freeman’s boyfriend, who some thought wasn’t happy that she was bartending, or at Larry Neumann, whose ex-wife had recently been thrown out of the bar, his daughter said. Neumann had occasionally socialized with Scharff and Hager, playing cards and drinking at P.M. Pub, Paul Scharff said.
“He really didn’t think [Neumann] would have done it because they all hung out and were kind of friends,” Holly Hager said.
No one was ever charged in connection with the slayings, though.
A mob thug named ‘Lurch’
In Las Vegas, Neumann had built quite a reputation for himself, according to the biography, “Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness.”
Cullotta and Neumann had worked together in Stateville Correctional Center’s psych ward as inmates after Neumann had been convicted of shooting three people in a Chicago tavern. Neumann, who committed the triple homicide because he believed he had been short-changed about two dollars, was paroled after 11 years, according to the biography.
The pair later met up in Las Vegas, and Cullotta recruited Neumann, nicknamed Lurch, for a gang of Mafia burglars and enforcers. One evening, Neumann’s ex-wife called him at Cullotta’s restaurant, and Neumann told the others there that “some guy” in a lounge grabbed her by the throat. Cullotta tried to talk Neumann out of killing the man, who Neumann believed had disrespected him, according to the biography.
“I know Larry, and I know Larry when he got off that phone with his ex-wife, he was a raving maniac,” Cullotta said during a recent phone interview arranged through biography co-author Dennis Griffin.
After Cullotta heard about a double homicide in McHenry County, he asked Neumann if he was responsible. Neumann said he had left a younger man in the car and confronted the guy who allegedly had assaulted his wife, ultimately shooting him in the forehead and then shooting a woman who was nearby.
Then, he searched the bar for a surveillance wire, took $6,000 cash and tossed the dismantled gun in a river, Cullotta said.
Cullotta disapproved of the slayings but didn’t chastise Neumann too severely.
“You just don’t go running around killing people. At least we didn’t, but he did. He was a mad dog,” Cullotta said. “But you don’t want to get a guy like that too upset or to think that he’s going to get killed, because he’s likely to kill us all.”
An investigation unfinished
After Cullotta, Neumann, and the rest of their crew of burglars were caught robbing a Las Vegas gifts and home furnishings store, Cullotta made a deal with federal authorities that gave him immunity in exchange for ratting out his former mob colleagues.
Cullotta said he later described to authorities the conversation about the Lakemoor slayings, as well as what Neumann told him about fatally stabbing a Chicago jeweler during a robbery. Neumann received a life sentence for the jeweler’s murder and died in January 2007 at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, said Griffin, the biography’s coauthor.
Cullotta said he didn’t think McHenry County authorities were receptive to his information in 1982.
“They just looked at me,” Cullotta said. “They didn’t even write anything down. They just sat there.”
Lowery, the current undersheriff, said he was unsure how his predecessors assessed the credibility of Cullotta’s previous statements.
“We believe that information is credible enough to carry this investigation further,” Lowery said.
But Scharff’s oldest son, Paul, wants to know more than who pulled the trigger.
Paul Scharff turned 11 on the day of his father’s wake and often felt the community viewed him only as the kid whose father was shot. Now 38, Paul Scharff wants to know why the homicides weren’t solved 25 years or so ago.
“If people weren’t protecting and serving us, I think they need to explain why they weren’t,” Scharff said. “And I think that’s a really important question not just for my family, but the community as well.”
