A Cop’s Memoir
The stained Life and Rude Times of Mob Wannabe “Bolo” Dovishaw

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Erie, Pennsylvania; January 3, 1983: Are you ready for some football?

Frank “Ash Wednesday” Dovishaw was more than ready that bitterly cold Monday night. He didn’t care who won or lost the last National Football League game of the regular season. But the man also called “Bolo” did indeed care about local sports betting on the nationally-televised pro game, and more specifically about his “take” on the action.

Frank or “Ash Wednesday” or “Bolo.” He had many nicknames and aliases. He was a bookmaker. Not just a garden variety illegal numbers and sports-betting bookie. In partnership with an admitted mob hit man, he ran Northwestern Pennsylvania’s most lucrative bookmaking operation, one that easily handled hundreds of thousands of dollars over that busy college bowl and professional football weekend. He was king of the local action.

Unfortunately for Bolo, he wouldn’t get to watch football that night; nor would he take another bet. Just hours before kickoff, begging for mercy on his knees, Frank Dovishaw lost not a wager, but his life. The execution-style, gangland murder set off a series of events for Erie’s top homicide investigator that would span seven years. It touched virtually every aspect of this lakeside city’s dark underbelly, and cast an even wider interstate net.

Along the way, it became the story of dirty cops, hit men, drug dealers, crooked lawyers, and co-conspirators who eventually abandoned omerta, their code of silence. Yet, despite myriad obstacles and the stunningly vicious, jaw-dropping, but brutally true nature of events, this cop’s unrelenting quest for Dovishaw’s killers could not be stopped. Here are the hair-raising, behind-the-scenes details that never made the newspaper or evening news. Here is the extraordinary inside and long-untold tale of a cop who refused to quit despite death threats and bribery attempts, instead following his instinct, gut and personal code of justice to the ultimate culmination of The Unholy Murder of Ash Wednesday.

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