Cold case solved: Bergen prosecutor files murder charge in 38-year-old Teaneck mob killing

• The Bergen County Prosecutor's Office charged Joseph Labosco with murder in a 1980 mob killing
• Labosco is already serving two years in federal prison for parole violation
• It's the second time this year the Prosecutor's Office has brought charges in a decades-old murder

It’s not clear how George King and Joseph Labosco lured Wayne Eckhart, a Broadway stagehand with a felonious past, into their car in the pre-dawn darkness of Oct. 1, 1980.

The three New Yorkers were associates, as it were, with loose connections to organized crime. So the two may have baited Eckhart with promises of handsome profit from a quick contract in Jersey. Or maybe it was simpler, like a rumor of a good time at an after-hours bar across the Hudson.

Whatever King and Labosco said, it was a lie. Because when their car crossed back into New York City, it was one man short. And the revolver they carried was two bullets light.

"This is a typical type of murder," Bryan Burke, a captain in the Teaneck police, told The Record at the time. "Someone will drive someone to some secluded spot and then blow them away."

Authorities knew much of this 38 years ago, said Chief Robert Anzilotti of the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. But they lacked the evidence to charge the two men, who investigators now believe shot and killed the 50-year-old Eckhart before dragging his bloody corpse into the woods off DeGraw Avenue in Teaneck.

That changed last week when the Prosecutor’s Office announced a charge of first-degree murder against Labosco, now a 71-year-old inmate serving a two-year bid in Brooklyn for federal parole violation. Renewed efforts by detectives from the office’s seven-month-old cold case homicide unit, combined with a DNA analysis of physical evidence collected in 1980, led to the breakthrough, Anzilotti said Thursday.

“It was a case I felt was solvable,” he said. “And it was one of the first cases I wanted these guys to focus on.”

It’s the second time this year the cold case unit has met with remarkable success: In May, authorities charged Jose Colon, a 44-year-old fugitive from Nicaragua, with killing Hyo J. Lee, an Englewood nail salon worker, on a sweltering summer night 19 years ago. That case, like the Eckhart murder, was broken open thanks to advances in DNA testing that let authorities use crime scene data to name a suspect in a killing whose trail had long ago gone cold.

Anzilotti declined to say Thursday what evidence the prosecutor sent to the New Jersey State Police laboratory for DNA testing.

But the arrest documents say it was an item found next to Eckhart’s body when police discovered it in 1980. This matches the account of a watch that lay nearby, according to a Record article written the next day.

The Prosecutor’s Office declined to comment about the watch.

Anzilotti said detectives also interviewed a number of local authorities who worked the case and federal agents who focused on mob-related activity. They included Joe Pistone, who famously infiltrated the Bonanno crime family in the 1970s.

“He definitely helped connect some dots as to who the players were,” Anzilotti said.

Anzilotti said the prosecutor would also have charged King with murder, had he not died in 2007.

Superior Court officials in New Jersey have not yet scheduled Labosco’s first appearance.

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Colorful pasts

Eckhart, though the named victim, was hardly an innocent casualty of a Five Families drug war.

He was an old-school New York tough guy who floated from job to job, working for whatever criminal enterprise would have him, Anzilotti said.

Labosco, an associate of the Bonanno crime family, and King, who had ties to the Westies, a psychotically violent Hell’s Kitchen street gang, were similarly amenable.

“They were freelancers that would do anything that would put a buck in their pocket,” Anzilotti said.

Eckhart, a Manhattan native, was the cellblock bully at Green Haven State Prison in Stormville, New York, where he served time for manslaughter, according to a Record article written about two weeks after he was killed. Out on parole, he was working part time in the theater district and living in the Lathern Hotel near 20th Street.

He’d also made a lot of enemies.

“There were an awful lot of people who had reason to do him in,” Burke, the Teaneck police captain, said in the article.

King and Labosco had their own rich criminal history — especially Labosco, who was arrested on New Year’s Day 1969 and charged with shooting and killing Peter Wong, a 21-year-old college student, near Chinatown, according to a New York Times article.

The slaying, which police called “apparently senseless” and “unprovoked,” was the first of that year, happening just six hours after the ball dropped, the Times said.

Labosco, of Staten Island, was convicted of manslaughter and served 11 years. He was later convicted on separate instances of weapon and drug possession, the most recent of which landed him in federal prison in Brooklyn.

Despite the trio’s crooked leanings, Eckhart’s murder was no ordered assassination, Anzilotti said. It was the settling of a personal vendetta that sprang from disputes about money and an old girlfriend.

Eckhart was angry that his former lover was dating a business associate of King and Labosco, the chief said. The two were worried Eckhart would interrupt one of their profitable-but-illegal ventures, so they concocted a plot to ferry him to the swampy area on the fringe of the Meadowlands.

Canvassed witnesses heard a pair of gunshots at about 6 a.m., Anzilotti said. Investigators believe this was King and Labosco shooting Eckhart in the back of the head while he sat in the car.

Then they drove to a wooded spot near what is now the Glenpointe hotel-office complex, dragged Eckhart from the car and covered him with a big piece of cardboard, the chief said.

An anonymous dog walker reported the body about two hours later, according to news reports.

The head wounds, the position of the body and the area in which it was found all pointed to a professional hit, said Ronald Deramo, a Prosecutor’s Office lieutenant who worked on the case.

Authorities suspected Labosco, Deramo wrote in an email, but they could not prove he was at the scene until the recent advances in DNA testing.

Burke, the Teaneck captain who later became the department’s chief, did not remember the case specifically. But he marveled at DNA technology and the gifts it can hand police so long after a crime.

“We didn’t have it in those days,” he said. “I think it’s wonderful they solved one of our unsolved crimes — that’s always a feather in the cap.”

Email: Janoski@northjersey.com