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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 11
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 11

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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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11
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THE uu. BUSINESS INSIDE EDITORIALS 2 CITY NEIGHBORHOODS 5 OBITUARIES 6 STATE SECTION Tww: PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, WW mJLLm f2S IS wJi HOLOCAUST HEROINE At Zionist banquet, Squirrel I fill cantor recalls Emilie Schindler's role in saving Jews at her husbands factory in Nazi Germany. ilhW ujiiimu Biim -ft-n i iniiifiri-li-mairtfiiiTiiin- liii i Should Ferlo resign post? Some say he agreed to resign presidency of council Dec. 31 it fit. if i ji By Tom Barnes Post-Gazette Staff Writer Will Jim Ferlo, who led a coup in January 1993 to try to become City Council president and was elected to the job in January 1994, suddenly step down from the top spot Dec.

31? No way, says Ferlo. Yet a scenario for a possible change in the council presidency was outlined last week by several top city officials, including Mayor Murphy. The mayor says he has a clear memory of an arrangement worked out by council members in the early morning hours of Jan. 3, under which Ferlo would be elected by his colleagues as council president for 1994. Under the plan, Ferlo was to resign voluntarily after one year, and Councilman Bob O'Connor was to be elected in January 1995 as council president for 1995.

Normally council presidents are elected for two years. "That was the clear indication I received, that Jim would be president in 1994 and Bob would be in 1995," Murphy said in an interview last week. "It was never in writing, but that is my remembrance." Early last January, Murphy said, there was "confusion" over whom North Side Councilman Dan Onor-ato would vote for. Both Ferlo and O'Connor had four votes and both needed Onorato as a fifth and deciding vote, so a power-sharing compromise was worked out. Ferlo heatedly denied any such power-sharing deal.

"I was elected to a two-year term as president, and I fully intend to serve it," he said Saturday. "Is this statement by the mayor retaliation for the veto override?" Ferlo recently led the way on council to override Murphy's only veto to date, concerning the use of $75,000 for youth activities. The two SEE COUNCIL, PAGE B-7 Homicide total hits 57 as two die on N. Side Dan LevmePost-Gazette Emilie Schindler, right, widow of Oskar Schindler, is greeted by Inez Schaiffer, whose husband, Juan Jorge Schaiffer, was translating Mrs. Schindler's German at a news briefing before last night's awards dinner.

Schindler's wife reunited with survivor from clisf BRIAN O'NEILL Some really hurt when sports stop I ease through the front door of the house in Wilkins as the mutts Mike and Sassy yap at my feet; Dawn Check has one hand on the door but needs the other to hold 7-week-old son A. meantime, 4V4-year-old Jake waits for an opening to show me his dinosaur collection. This is a story of the baseball and hockey strikes. We did without the Pirates and now we're doing without the Penguins. For most of us, it has been only an annoyance.

For the Check family, it means they're going to have to live with the green carpet the puppy chewed. All home improvements are on hold. Nobody needs sports radio engineers when there are no games. Doran and Dawn Check aren't what anyone would call whiners. When he was a student at Edin-boro College, Doran would drive two hours each way to work the Pirates games.

He squeeze classes into the mornings because he had to be at the stadium three hours before game time. "I'd have my calculus book open on the steering wheel," he recalled. Some late nights Doran would pull over on Interstate 79 and catch some Z's. All this for 50 bucks a game but that's where you start. His father, Mel, led him into the business.

(Yeah, Mel is out money now, too.) Doran met Dawn, then a KDKA producer, over the phone in 1987 while working Pirates games. After they married in November 1988, Doran spent several years as a $40-a-day substitute teacher, working Pirates and Pens games at night. "Those games were the only thing that kept us afloat," Doran said. "If they'd have gone on strike then, it would nave burned us." By '92 they had enough saved to buy this two-bedroom house that needed work. In the fall of '93, Doran became a full-time math teacher at Northgate High School but, as Dawn says, "teachers aren't as rich as they say." He kept doing night games and she handled day games.

Last summer, Dawn said, "the baby had the bad sense to try and come during the last IPirates homestand." She told him, "Please, kid, hang on a little bit." A.J. showed that he'd inherited some of his parents' instinct for thrift, waiting until Sept. 8 to be born. But a month later the hockey players struck, just as "Doran the doomsayer" had foretold. Radio engineers, ushers, vendors these are the people to sympathize with during the sports strikes.

Who can relate to the numbers the players and owners throw down? The Checks figure they lost about $2,500 on the baseball strike. The no-hockey meter is running. Baseball may return in the spring, but Doran isn't counting on hockey coming back anytime soon. "We have plans like most people have plans," Doran said. "Everything is on hold.

Certain bills we wanted paid off by the end of the summer haven't been paid, so we can't finance additions." Dawn is on maternity leave from her own job in Oakland with United Campus Ministry. She was to return in January, but with recent budget cutbacks she is unsure if she still has a job. "Even when I go back, I don't know how I'm going to pay for child care; the Penguins help pay for my child care," she said. Has her faith been shaken? "No, because God has saved our butt in so many different situations," she said. Eariy in their marriage, there were times when they used their Visa card to pay the rent; now Doran's health benefits are taking care of A.J., who has been in and out of the hospital.

Unexpected nights off have given a young father blessed time with his family. On the other hand, Dawn said, "It's really hard for me to feel sorry for Barry Bonds." By Gary Rotstein Post-Gazette Staff Writer Moshe Taube and Emilie Schindler saw each other for the first time in 49 years last night. This time, they were in formal dress at the Westin William Penn instead of in common clothes at the munitions factory where her husband saved the lives of Taube, his father and 1,100 other Jews during World War II. Schindler didn't recognize Taube and couldn't have been expected to, said the Holocaust survivor who has become the cantor at Beth Shalom Congregation in Squirrel Hill. But Taube remembered her vividly, and they spoke in German without getting into detail of the atrocities by the Nazis and the extraordinary acts Oskar Schindler took to protect his Jewish concentration camp workers from them.

Oskar Schindler's heroics were made famous in Stephen Spielberg's Oscar-winning film, "Schindler's List," in which Emilie Schindler's character was reduced to a small background role. "I told her I'm a Schindlerjude one of Schindler's Jews and her face lit up," said Taube, who sang two songs in Mrs. Schindler's honor at the local Zionist Orga A' "5 'J nization of America annual dinner, where she was guest of honor. "I expected to see a broken old woman. I am delighted to see a woman full of life," Taube said of Mrs.

Schindler, 87, who has lived in Argentina since 1949. Her husband died 20 years ago in Germany, where he had returned in 1957., With good spirits and a ready laugh, the small woman, seated with her cane in her hands, spoke briefly to reporters before receiving her award. But she shed no light on the behavior of her husband, who was accurately depicted in the film as a womanizer and heavy drinker. "She doesn't feel like talking about his character," Carnegie Mellon University Professor Juan Jorge Schaiffer said when translating, from German to English, Mrs. Schindler's response to a question about her husband's motivations.

"She says that she thinks Spielberg did an excellent job with the film, but that things were actually much worse than they showed in the film, and that if Spielberg had shown things the way they really were, people would have been scared and run away," Schaiffer related. She said without elaboration the film "didn't represent her role at all" in her husband's work to protect Jews. INSIGHT Over the past 15 years, DeCello has taken more than a dozen people for nearly $674,500, according to documents in the criminal cases filed against him. And that's not counting his involvement in a scheme to evade taxes on diesel fuel that cost state and federal governments more than $4.6 million. Despite numerous criminal cases filed against him since 1980, DeCello has yet to serve a jail sentence.

That should end today, when he is sentenced by U.S. District Donald J. Lee for his role in the diesel fuel fraud. Lee is expected to give DeCello a five-year prison term, the maximum for the charge of conspiracy to commit mail fraud that he was convicted of in May. "He was one of the most affable, likable guys you would ever want to meet," said Mullin, who was shocked to learn about the other victims.

"When you got on the phone and you had a cough, he would be concerned The next couple times ne talked to you, he would ask how your cold was. He was the kind of person you thought of as a real friend, so that's why it shocked me when things turned out this way, it really did." DeCello, 58, of Mt. Lebanon, is a former attorney who was disbarred in 1987 for "widespread misuse" of clients' funds. The disbarment occurred eight years after the state Supreme Court indefinitely suspended DeCello's license. A longtime friend traveling with her, Bernard Scheuer, explained that the film was based on a book whose author, Thomas Keneally, was unable to interview her because he was doing his research during the Falklands War and couldn't enter Argentina.

In fact, Scheuer said, Mrs. Schindler supervised the food and medical needs of the Jewish workers at the munitions factory in Brinnlitz on the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia. She is also credited with doing her own lobbying with German officials on her husband's behalf. Taube remembers primarily a beautiful woman walking daily through the factory, unable to speak to workers because SS guards were observing. "She was always walking with a smile, a glamour girl.

She had a beauty with a warmth," Taube said. "She gave moral support to her husband, and by seeing her, the inmates were encouraged." In addition to the Justice Louis D. Bran-deis Award presented to Mrs. Schindler and her husband, the tri-state chapter of the ZOA gave lawyer K. Sidney Neuman its Community Leadership Award and Marian Ungar Davis of Wilkins its Israel Service Award for her fund-raising project enabling high school seniors to view "Schindler's List." Anthony V.

DeCello in 1973 file photo. ''V'V- A is Anatomy of a con artist 1 low disbarred Mt. Lebanon lawyer swindled so many ft By Johnna A. Pro Post-Gazette Staff Writer Detectives were trying to establish a link between "the shooting deaths of two men early yesterday on the North Side. They also were investigating a third shooting that left a man in critical condition.

The killings shortly after 1 a.m. brought to 57 the number of homicides in the city this year, said Lt. William Joyce of the police major crimes unit. They were the third and fourth homicides in the city since Friday afternoon. Killed yesterday were Montell Herring, 21, and Robert Glover, 23, both of the North Side.

In critical condition at an undisclosed hospital was Charles Gange, 30, also ot the North Side. "We're looking into the possibility that there is a connection between the shootings of Glover and Herring," Joyce said. Police "found Herring at 1:28 a.m. in the 300 block of Mount Pleasant Road with a gunshot wound to the head after the city's 911 dispatch center received reports of shots fired in the area. Medics pronounced him dead 12 minutes later.

Herring, an employee at a dairy, had notified his supervisor that he was feeling ill and planned to leave work, Joyce said. "We're still canvassing and trying to find witnesses to the shooting. We don't know why he went to that area," Joyce said. Herring had been carrying a white powdery substance, possibly crack cocaine, and a 9 mm handgun, Joyce said. While officers were trying to de- SEE SLAYINGS, PAGE B-7 ft By Mike Bucsko Post-Gazette Staff Writer When Gerald Mullin met Anthony V.

DeCello about six years ago, he immediately knew DeCello was a kindred spirit. Both were "frustrated jocks" who loved to talk sports. They knew many of the same people in professional athletic circles Mullin from his career as a Philadelphia police officer and businessman and DeCello from contacts made during his years as a sports agent. By 1990, when DeCello offered Mullin a "deal you can't refuse," a close friendship had developed between the men from opposite ends of Pennsylvania. DeCello told Mullin he needed to raise $90,000 to invest in a landfill and wanted to cut Mullin in on the deal.

For $18,000, DeCello promised Mullin a $2,000 return in three weeks, plus a 1 percent investment in the landfill that would guarantee him $40,000 a year for the next 10 years. "I had been involved in selling a landfill and I knew what kind of money you could make off it, so this didn't sound far-fetched to me," Mullin said last week during a telephone interview from Florida. "So I sent him the $18,000." Mullin tried for a year to get his money back. In August 1991, DeCello sent him a $20,000 check. It bounced.

Mullin had become another in a long line of victims of Tony DeCello. DeCello did not respond to several requests for interviews from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Though he has not been allowed to practice law in Pennsylvania for 15 years, DeCello has repeatedly passed himself oft as an attorney and offered to perform legal work. Mullin said DeCello introduced himself as a lawyer when they first met in 1988. SEE CONVICT, PAGE B-4 I.

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