Nearly 6,000 visitors came for the Popeye Parade and Spinach Cook-Off, the Wimpy`s Hamburger Eating Contest and the Swee` Pea Chariot Race held a few weeks ago in this bluff-top southern Illinois river town.
Held in honor of Chester native Elzie Segar, creator of the cartoon sailor Popeye, this year`s fall festival enjoyed the balmiest weather and biggest crowds in recent memory. But a few days after the best Popeye Picnic ever, the G-men came to town and delivered a Bluto-like blow to Chester`s civic solar plexus.
”It`s too bad; we had just come off a real high with the Popeye Picnic, and then this happened,” said veteran local journalist Eileen Gordon.
Chester was sent reeling in mid-September when FBI agents arrested two prominent local men, one of them a former city police officer who just two years ago campaigned unsuccessfully for Randolph County sheriff.
Wielding the same federal law used to convict reputed New York Mafia leader John Gotti-the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act-the FBI charged the two Chester men with operating a murder-and-arson-for-profit organization for more than 12 years and across at least three southern Illinois counties.
The federal agents were still in town this week, interviewing and interrogating a wide array of Chester`s citizenry, and rumors of further arrests and additional charges have the town buzzing.
”This is like something you`d see in a soap opera, including all the elements of sleaze,” lamented Chester Police Chief Jack Houghlan. ”It`s bowled over the town and the whole county.”
As home to the Menard Correctional Center, Chester is ”a town of 8,000 people-3,000 of them behind bars,” Houghlan noted. And it may be that before this investigation is concluded, a few more Chester residents will be counted as inmates rather than citizens.
So far, federal agents have charged that nine area fires and one auto accident were staged-in the case of the car wreck to cover up a murder-as insurance fraud in a complex and cold-blooded criminal campaign based in tiny Chester.
Houghlan said that at least two other local men with knowledge of the crimes are cooperating with investigators. One of them, a local contractor, led agents to the alleged murder weapon, an 18-inch-long iron bar. The other informant until recently was the head of the Randolph County Housing Authority.
Investigators are looking into at least two other fatal accidents and additional fires, giving residents of this region cause to question the true nature of similar events dating back decades, Houghlan said. ”Anyone who has had a fire in 25 years is a suspect now,” said one resident.
About a dozen area deaths over the last two decades have also been targeted for scrutiny, according to Houghlan. Originally ruled suicides, the deaths are being reviewed because of the widespread criminal activities uncovered in the investigation, he said.
”When something has been going on this long, it doesn`t hurt to look,”
said the beleaguered police chief. ”This is a continuing saga. I`m so busy I`m about to pass myself.”
The sordid drama in Popeye country had its public premiere Sept. 16, when FBI agents arrested former Chester police officer and one-time sheriff candidate Michael T. Korando Jr., 44, along with his former campaign manager, John L. Buskohl, 50, a local real-estate and life insurance agent who was once executive assistant to the superintendent at Menard prison.
The FBI charged that they murdered Donnie Clark II, 24, of Chester and then staged a car wreck to mask the murder in a scheme to profit from his insurance. One informant told the FBI that Buskohl said the victim, the father of three children, was ”a local scum bag” whose death would draw little notice, according to court documents.
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Where`s the money?
Like Chester itself, which is festooned with the likenesses of Olive Oyl, Popeye and pals, the schemes of the alleged conspirators had certain comic aspects. These alleged racketeers, apparently, had some problems making crime pay.
None of the men charged or those under investigation ”lived high on the hog,” Houghlan said, though Buskohl did own a dozen properties that the FBI has targeted for seizure.
”Buskohl lived in a dump, and the other players were pretty much on the same level,” Houghlan said. ”Nobody can figure out where the money went. That`s the big question around town.”
Added one federal agent who is examining the case, ”There was a lot of effort to make money, but it doesn`t look like there was ever that much profit.”
The burly Korando, who was a Chester police officer from 1970 to 1981 before quitting to become a tug-boat operator, tried to get back into law enforcement two years ago by campaigning for Randolph County sheriff with a pledge to guarantee the ”protection of all citizens.”
He made that pledge in campaign speeches and literature in fall 1989, just a few weeks after he allegedly brutally murdered one of those citizens-Clark-on July 3, 1989, according to the federal charges.
After their arrests last month, Buskohl and Korando were ordered held without bond by a federal judge who noted that, based on the FBI`s testimony, ”it would not surprise me that one or more of these witnesses would wind up in the same condition” as the alleged murder victim.
Korando is known locally as a former Chester High School football star of considerable physical strength and a somewhat less-imposing intellect. The woefully inept scheme to kill Clark and profit from his life-insurance policy failed because of one rather significant oversight, police said: The men now under indictment neglected to have their intended victim sign the insurance forms before dispatching him with an iron bar to the head. ”It seems the guy in charge of the killing was more efficient than the guy in charge of the insurance,” one FBI agent said.
When the oversight was noticed posthumously, a crude attempt was made to forge Clark`s name to the documents, the agent charged. The victim`s family spotted the phony signatures immediately.
Enter the beneficiary
It also did not escape their attention that the beneficiary listed on Clark`s $125,000 policies was his employer, Thomas Kopshever, 40, whose own myriad crimes were what originally brought FBI agents into the Chester area.
Kopshever, who owned property in Chester and operated a marina and recreational-vehicle dealership in Murphysboro, about 40 miles to the southeast, is serving a 10-year federal prison term for defrauding elderly investors and several banks of $2.5 million.
He also was convicted this year of operating what the FBI agent called a
”desperate” counterfeiting operation begun when Kopshever sensed that the bureau was closing in on his fraudulent businesses, investigators said. Kopshever apparently hoped to pay off creditors with fake $20 bills produced on a rented copying machine.
Kopshever, who had business dealings with Buskohl and Korando, has not been charged in connection with Clark`s murder or the arsons, but he has been interviewed in the current investigation, according to court documents. In a preliminary court hearing, FBI agent Rick Stonecipher testified that an informant said Kopshever paid $28,000 for Clark`s killing.
The FBI has charged that Korando killed Clark behind Kopshever`s RV business. Clark had been working only a few months for another of Kopshever`s questionable enterprises, a firm that sold a ”miracle” cleaner that police say consisted of ammonia and water.
According to the FBI allegations, Korando savagely beat Clark to death just weeks before the former Chester police officer began his campaign for sheriff. Korando then staged a one-car crash to make it appear that Clark died accidentally, according to the FBI.
Investigators said Clark`s body was exhumed late last week and will be examined by a nationally known forensics expert.
The victim`s family felt from the beginning that it was highly suspicious that such a minor accident-the car had only a dented bumper and cracked windshield-could have resulted in such massive head and internal injuries, they said.
”Our whole family thought (Korando and Buskohl) had something to do with it,” said Clark`s mother, Joanne, who made those suspicions known to anyone who would listen, including the FBI, in the months and years after his death. A surprise marriage
The family certainly could not have missed the fact that shortly after Clark`s burial, his pregnant girlfriend married Buskohl, the man who had written the insurance policies on Clark.
”That`s where the sleaze comes in,” said Houghlan, who described Buskohl as ”an `Oil Can` Harry from the word go.”
”No one has a good word for him,” said the police chief. ”That man would have to hire his own pallbearers.”
Houghlan theorizes that Clark`s killing was plotted as a two-birds-with-one-stone deal. It got Clark out of the way so Buskohl could move in on his girlfriend and it offered the potential for a profit from the victim`s insurance policies, Houghlan alleged.
”They worked into the confidence of these young people; it`s kind of sad,” Houghlan said.
When the FBI contacted the Chester police chief two years ago during its investigation into Kopshever`s business dealings in the area, Houghlan told the agents about his suspicions concerning Clark`s death and several other suspect occurrences, he said.
Two other fatal auto accidents now top the list for examination by the FBI and the police chief, Houghlan said.
The first of those involved the 1989 death of a woman who, just a few weeks before she died, had quit working as a secretary for both Buskohl and Kopshever. The woman, Kay Olson, apparently died after falling out of a vehicle traveling at 60 m.p.h. At the time it was ruled an accident.
The second fatality under scrutiny is so similar to that of Clark`s that
”if you erased the names you wouldn`t know which case you were reading,”
Houghlan said. Two aspects of that 1982 accident, which killed Tommy D. Belton, 23, make it worthy of further investigation, he said.
One is that Buskohl was his insurance agent. The other is the victim`s nickname: ”Pigeon.”
