Crime Beat

involved in 14 contract slayings. Last year, Hardy appeared in disguise on Geraldo Rivera’s syndicated television show during a segment on purported hit men. He declined to confirm or deny his involvement in the slayings when Rivera questioned him.
    “I’m not going to sit here on national TV and confess to murders because, you know, you really aren’t paying me enough for that,” said Hardy, who used the name Michael Hardin on the program.
    Authorities said they found no indications that Hardy was actually a contract killer.
    “I think he’s a blowhard,” Goldstein said. “He has lived a long and violent life, but no hit man worth his salt goes around talking about it.”

THE GANG THAT COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT
THE MAIL-ORDER MURDERS
    SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL
    October 4, 1987
    I T WOULD HAVE BEEN comical if it hadn’t been so deadly, if lives hadn’t been mercilessly ended or, at the very least, haunted by terror. They were called the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, yet they were a gang that had so many shots, they were bound to hit their targets sometimes, and people were bound to die.
    For months they tried to kill Doug Norwood, but whether they came at him with machine guns or bombs or stun guns, they always managed to screw up. The same thing with Dana Free. Three times they missed. And when it came time to kill Victoria Barshear, well, the gang just decided she was too pretty to die.
    Those were some of the gaffes that made them laughable. But there was nothing laughable about what happened to Richard Braun and Anita Spearman. They killed Braun, though it took two tries, in the front yard of his home. It took only one visit from the gang and Anita Spearman was left dead in her bed.
    They were want-ad killers, a gang of losers, social outcasts and law enforcement washouts headed by a man with the seemingly appropriate name of Richard Savage. They picked their targets from West Palm Beach to St. Paul, their clients from the Atlantic to the Rockies.
    It was nothing personal. In a sleazy Tennessee bar where strippers danced, the gang plotted the deaths of people they had never even seen: Anita Spearman, the well-known and well-liked assistant city manager in West Palm Beach; Doug Norwood, a law student in Arkansas; Dana Free, a contractor in Georgia. And others, many others.
    T HEY PICTURED THEMSELVES as guns for hire. One day barroom bouncers, the next day cross-country contract killers. No job too big or too small. One member helped a man put a bomb on a plane loaded with 154 people. One shot down a man in his driveway while his son watched in horror. Another threw grenades into a home where a 14-year-old and his mother were sleeping.
    Their crimes were spread across the country, to avoid a pattern of terror that might aid the police in their investigations. What did the bombing of a businessman’s van in Atlanta have to do with a suitcase explosion in the cargo hold of a jet in Dallas? What could the arson of a poultry plant in Iowa have in common with the murder of a city official in Palm Beach County?
    Seemingly, the answer would be nothing, the questions not even considered. Even so, in less than a year, a far-flung network of investigative agencies working on the many separate cases found the common denominator in the back pages of a magazine published for gun and battle buffs. From there the investigators picked up the pieces of the puzzle and put it together. Even today, they feel lucky about it.
    “This is a case of truth being stranger than fiction—it’s mind-boggling,” says Tom Stokes, special agent in charge of the Atlanta office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). “At times you needed a flow chart to keep it straight. These guys were bouncing all over the country doing these jobs. Thank goodness, we got coordinated on it.”
    In the end, two people were dead, several others were injured, and many were scared for their lives. Doug Norwood, who escaped death three times after being shot and bombed, still carries a gun. Who can blame him? Across the country Savage’s gang had left a trail of terror and deadly ineptitude.
    T HE TRAIL STARTED in spring 1985 in Knoxville, Tenn. Richard Savage was into his fourth business venture in almost as many years and there was no telling whether his Continental Club was going to do any better than the restaurant or the motel or the nursing home that had failed before it.
    Savage’s new profession—operator of a