Written by Hot Rod Archives on May 20, 2015
Drag Racing, Drug Running, Kidnapping, the Mob, and Murder
Drag racing is dangerous, but there are worse things out there—things besides a bad crash that can get you killed. Funny Car pioneer Steve Bovan couldn’t have known what dangers lay outside of drag racing, but the sensational end to his life might have been avoided had he stuck with the danger he knew, instead of the danger he couldn’t have imagined.
Bovan was a barnstorming drag racer in the 1960s and early 1970s, something most racers dreamed of doing. Who wouldn’t love to have been a touring drag racer from that golden era?
Bovan raced his Junior Stock Corvette in the early 1960s with Dick Castro, winning NHRA C/Stock in 1964. He also raced a 1956 Chevy in Modified Production, and later in 1964 he was running a Max Wedge Mopar. But he wanted something faster.
Says fellow Blair’s Speed Shop alum Robbie Robison, “He was a tough kid out of a tough area: El Sereno, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles. He had gotten into trouble, but once he was at Blair’s he straightened himself out and even got married.” Working in the engine room at the famous Blair’s in Pasadena, California, he built most of its race motors at a time when the shop was pumping out straight-axle conversions and altered-wheelbase stockers. “It was an altered wheelbase assembly line,” says Blair’s Pete Poland. “And we built a lot of gassers; if you were into drag racing, Blair’s was heaven.”
“Bovan didn’t do drugs, wasn’t a womanizer, and was pretty fair with everyone, but you didn’t want to get him mad,” Robison says. One day a guy stole one of Bovan’s intake manifolds and went around to the front counter to try and sell it back to Blair’s. Someone recognized it and got Bovan. “When he saw this guy with his intake, he dropped him so fast I couldn’t believe it,” Robison says.
A quiet, big guy, Bovan’s success came from running first-class cars, instincts to win a few races, but also how to book match races, market himself and his car to snag sponsors, keep the car running, not wreck it, and then have something left to actually travel around from track to track.
“Back when you could cut a zero [reaction] time, he was consistently cutting zeros,” says Pete Eastwood, who, as a kid hanging out at Blair’s, would accompany Bovan with his Camaro Funny Car to local SoCal tracks like Irwindale and Lions. “He raced a lot in those days because he was good.” He would occasionally wrench and shoe for other racers, piloting the Samson Dart Funny Car, Nelson Carter’s Charger Funny Car, Al Vanderwoude’s Flying Dutchman, and other classic Funny Cars.
Bovan talked Don Blair into letting him and Blair’s fabricator, Mike Hoag, build and sponsor a big-block Chevy II to take on Jack Chrisman and his fuel-burning Comet in late-1964. Bovan built the 396ci, supercharged big-block running 100 percent alcohol. Says Hoag, “That was the first crate big-block on the West Coast.” Poland says, “We had a backdoor at Chevy through sprint car driver Sam Hanks, who was a good friend of Blair’s. Once we got the engine, all the Chevy guys like Bill Thomas and Hayden Profitt came by to see it—nobody had ever seen a big-block on the West Coast.”
Blair’s Jim Bishop handbuilt the intake manifold for the 6-71 blower and then had Doug Robinson at Horsepower Engineering finish it because Blair’s didn’t have a Heliarc welder. Besides exhibition racing, the car ran CC/FD in NHRA competition.
The car was initially built with a T-85 three-speed from a Pontiac but that transmission could not hold up to the torque of the bad, blown big-block. Next came an in-and-out box built at Henry’s Machine in Bellflower, California, running as a high-gear-only car. It wasn’t long before the automatic A/FX cars started running quicker, so Bovan went to Art Carr for one of his automatics and an adaptor plate. Robison remembers, “Once it got that automatic, it went a lot quicker.”
One of the unique features of the Chevy II was its Morris Minor torsion bar suspension. Hoag says, “It got everything out of the way. This was early on when those [Funny Cars] were just starting. I had never built anything like that before.” Considered the first and one of the most fondly remembered blown Chevy A/FX Funny Cars, it ran a best of 9.29 seconds at 160 mph.
Jay Lindsley was running an Anglia Gasser out of Blair’s and worked with Bovan. “His Chevy was a high-gear-only, smoke-the-tires, exhibition match racer. It was a booking car, where you booked into a three-race deal with a group of match racers,” Lindsley says.
Poland left his senior year of high school early to go barnstorming with Bovan in 1966 and 1967. “We’d start with a couple of match races somewhere on the East Coast, then go from there. It would be ‘Jungle’ Jim Liberman with his Nova and Lew Arrington with the Brutus GTO from San Jose, Claire Sanderson with Limefire, Dick Brannan and Paula Murphy.” Bovan was friends with Jack Nicholson, another pioneering drag-racer friend from Temple City, California, and copied down all of his drag-racing contacts from a black book. “Then he’d start calling and booking races with [locally known] Funny Car guys,” Poland says.
At the time, they would experiment with different timing or bigger blower pulleys. “Nothing was on full kill, 100 percent,” Poland says. “We could get $200 for three runs and that would last a week, then the other bookings for the week were profit. We ran 100 percent alcohol and would tip in 10 to 15 percent pop [nitro] when we needed it.” Adds Lindsley, “But later when he built the Camaro, he got much more serious.”
The Camaro was a state-of-the-art, flip-top Funny Car. Mike Hoag again built the chassis, running a blown and injected big-block 427ci Chevy first on alcohol, then nitro. “We were just going by the seat of our pants,” Hoag says. “The chassis was more like a sprint-car chassis, but with a dragster cage. I used Indy-type cross-bar torsion bars because we thought we could load the car easier, but it didn’t work. Don Borth and I did the tin work inside.” Hoag built shock towers into the chassis for the long, Logghe-type coilovers in case Bovan wanted to change, but he didn’t until around 1970.
Another unique feature was the driver’s door. “That body was thick and heavy,” Poland says. “Antique Fiberglass in Pomona built the body from a new, stripped Camaro. It took two people to lift it and another to prop it up, so that’s three. With the door, we didn’t have to lift the body for Bovan to get in.”
Again Bovan and Poland went match racing. “We took off in June and came back in September. We’d take a spare block, crank, some heads, two sets of rods and pistons, a trans, axles, and go.”
“He even raced the car in Hawaii,” Eastwood says.
“Steve was the nicest guy, and very mild-mannered,” says Ed Justice Jr., whose father’s company, Justice Brothers, sponsored Bovan’s Camaro for two years. “He was a local hero in SoCal, and I encouraged my dad to get involved with sponsorship. In fact, he sold petroleum products for us for a time, and everybody liked him.”
Says Lindsley, “He was a charismatic guy, but he wasn’t afraid to manhandle [somebody] if he needed something, and he was sort of secretive of his personal life.”
“Money was always a problem, so Bovan never wanted to break the car,” Poland says. “He wanted to go fast, but didn’t want to pay to go fast. Nobody had sponsors back then, except the big guys, so you had to make it work from your match-race winnings.”
By 1970 his winnings were dwindling and there were rumors of multiple, simultaneous car owners Bovan promised to split winnings with, plus other sketchy dealings. Says Eastwood, “He didn’t live extravagantly at all, but he went through a lot of money. He always needed more money.” By the end of 1970, Bovan was living in expensive Newport Beach, California. Says Hoag, “I feel Steve took advantage of Don Blair. He’d go on tour, win a few races, and when he came back, he’d always be broke. I don’t know what happened to the money.”
“He needed money to keep racing, but the money started corrupting him. He should have done like Jim Liberman where he would take his earnings, put a little aside, and put the rest back into the car so he could win some more,” Poland says.
Bovan’s best time on nitro and with an automatic was 7.10 seconds at 204 mph. Looking to increase the shelf life of his Funny Car, he went to friend Hoag, now with his own race-car operation called M&S Welding in Irwindale, California, to help him rework his Camaro to adapt a new second-generation Camaro body and a 426 Hemi/Art Carr Clutchflite transmission combo. Bovan also found new sponsors that included DA Custom Oil Distributors and a middle-school teacher from Phoenix.
Then in 1971 Bovan sold the Camaro. He moved to less expensive Costa Mesa, California, just up the coast a few miles from Laguna Beach and started working first for a VW repair shop and then for Delthic Auto Designs, a car-customizing shop in Costa Mesa. His transition from drag racer to drug dealer must have happened around this time, because he was on probation from an Arizona conviction for selling 1,200 pounds of marijuana. “Once we heard about Bovan’s drug stuff, I could see the connection to money,” Poland says.
At this point, our story takes a detour through a dark journey stemming from drug manufacturing and distribution taking place in Orange County, California, in the 1960s and 1970s, culled from Orange County Grand Jury and Orange County Superior Court testimony, as well as Newport Beach Police Department (NBPD) and Orange County District Attorney interviews of the time. Though some or all of this seems like something out of a movie, rest assured it’s all been testified to under oath.
Delthic was one of many small companies owned by Prasadam Distributors Inc. (PDI), an amalgam of businesses purchased with cash by Joseph Shelton Davis III or “Dritavarata,” as fellow Hare Krishnas religious followers called him. His companies were donating more than $2 million to a Hare Krishna temple in Laguna Beach, according to the NBPD.
The temple, known as International Society of Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, was an unorthodox devotional Krishna organization loosely based on the teachings of Bhagavad-gita and Srimad-Bhagavatam. The bulk of its assets came from Hindu-related products and fruit juices it sold; from a Laguna Beach restaurant called Govinda’s, a Krishna health-food restaurant; and other less conventional methods.
To the uninitiated, the image of Hare Krishna came from their ubiquitous presence in airports, where young pilgrims cloaked in robes wearing ponytails offered books, incense, and paper flowers to travelers for a donation.
This temple had an illicit drug history going back to the 1960s when Timothy Leary, the long-time proponent of the hallucinogen LSD, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a gang of hippie surfers affiliated to and led by Leary who espoused a communal, free-love lifestyle based in Laguna Beach, were cooking the stuff in the Laguna Beach canyons just down the road from ISKCON. LSD was sold through the temple, it was said, because Leary liked their association with Eastern spirituality [Greg Lynd testimony to Orange County Grand Jury, 1973]. Leary would ultimately be arrested in Laguna Beach in 1968 and sentenced in March 1970 to prison for possession of marijuana, LSD, and hashish.
By the mid-1970s, ISKON’s financial portfolio ran the gamut of enterprises, with at least one revenue stream from the distribution and sale of hash oil. They used pilgrims as drug mules, smuggling “honey oil” hidden in typewriter cases from Pakistan through international airports, based on trial testimony. A $1,000 liter bottle could be sold for $11,000 in the United States—a tenfold profit. Once through customs, pilgrims would fly from Pakistan into Canada, mail their luggage and typewriter cases home, then travel back to Laguna Beach.
Though a completely different region today, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Middle East was a very open society, easy for carefree travelers to trek along what was called the “hippie trail,” a route running from England through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. There were nomads on camels, scenic vistas, and travel was made easy with restaurants, cheap lodging, and Western food available all along the way.
The huge sums of cash from drug sales posed the typical problem of laundering it. Prasadam Distributors Inc. funneled ISKCON’s cash through its maze of companies in the classic money-laundering pattern. As PDI became more entrenched in the management and distribution of drugs, it even took on freelance “associates,” who gave a percentage of their profits in exchange for the front PDI afforded.
While PDI was taking in millions of dollars, its loose accounting allowed associates and small-time dealers to skim, including Bovan. He must have known the money’s source and the persistent rumor that PDI investor Alexander Kulik, a frequent visitor to PDI companies, kept more than $1 million in cash buried somewhere. Kulik was a Krishna follower and generous ISKCON donor. His “service” to them was curiously confidential, but enormously important and greatly appreciated.
Eventually, the organization realized Bovan was embezzling. Rather than confronting him directly, they chose to have someone outside take care of it. They contacted Frank Rossi, the brother-in-law of the wife of an ISKCON associate. With help from friends Anthony “Big Tony” Merone and Raymond Resco, Rossi was hired to facilitate Bovan’s quick return of the stolen money, according to Robert Emory’s testimony in court.
The United States Marshals Services newly formed Witness Protection Program had just relocated ex-mobsters Merone and Resco to Orange County after they gave testimony in New York against the mob. In exchange they got a new, clean life in California. Their lives and that of Bovan’s would soon intersect with tragic results.
Rather than resolving Bovan’s embezzling, they muscled in on the fast cash, bringing in Merone’s son, “Little Tony,” to help “manage” PDI’s businesses, squeezing Bovan out. Bovan was surely mad about his ouster, based on what he did next. Bovan assembled former Delthic employees Stan Kieffer and Robert Shea to help hatch a plan. Kieffer and Shea should have known better, having recently been roughed up by Rossi and ISKCON thugs over skimming suspicions themselves, from Newport Police interviews with a confidential informant identified only as “CI.”
Their plan was put on hold when the Huntington Beach Police Department arrested Bovan for drug possession with intent to sell. It wasn’t until August 1977 when Bovan was released and their plan could be hatched.
Bovan rigged Kulik’s car to run out of gas one night, where he waited with a .45-caliber automatic pistol to kidnap Kulik at gunpoint. Bovan shoved him into the back of a pickup, and with Kieffer driving, Bovan and a bound Kulik rode together in the small camper. Bovan tried to coax the location of Kulik’s cool cash with the butt of his loaded pistol. He denied he had a cash stash, but offered up $100,000 in a safe at PDI.
The next day, following instructions the kidnappers gave by phone, three cars were dispatched to the lookout on Interstate 5 just outside of San Clemente, California. Accompanying Big Tony was PDI’s Joe Fedorowski, known as “Gupta,” and Rossi in one car, Little Tony and Resco in the second car, and Joe Davis and another East Coast associate of the Merones named Jerry Fiori. En route, Little Tony and Resco helped themselves to an estimated $70,000 of the $100,000, assuming the kidnappers would not notice until after releasing Kulik.
When the rescuers pulled into the lookout parking lot and saw the pickup, out popped Bovan swinging his .45, crazy with rage, yelling and screaming at Rossi. One car in the trio blocked the exit while Bovan was calmed down and the cash could be laid on the truck’s seat. Then the kidnappers tried to leave without giving up Kulik. Rossi got out of his car and screamed at the truck to release Kulik or no one was leaving. As the kidnappers sped away, Kulik was kicked out the back, blindfolded with his hands taped behind his back. A car with Big Tony, Fiori, and Davis followed them down the interstate toward San Diego, where a cops-and-robbers-type running gun battle exploded.
Somehow the kidnappers successfully outran the gun-waving mobsters. No one was injured in the back-and-forth exchange of gunfire, according to trial testimony by Kieffer. Now Kulik and the ISKCON heads plotted their next move. Hoping to get revenge and eliminate three embezzlers in a single act, they offered Big Tony and Resco a $125,000 contract for the murder of Bovan, Kieffer, and Shea.
The plan was to capture the kidnappers and then kill them by injecting them with pure heroin, making it look like an overdose. Big Tony and his associates staked out Bovan’s home for weeks and just missed Kieffer and Shea, who were spotted by lookouts in a free food line at a Krishna temple in San Diego. Yet the kidnappers managed to elude their capture for more than a month.
Big Tony spread the word he would pay $1,200 to anyone who saw Bovan, according to testimony from Frank Rossi’s brother-in-law, Rick Willis. Finally, in the early misty morning hours of October 22, 1977, Bovan was seen at the bar of a Mexican restaurant in Newport Beach. Big Tony, Resco, and Fiori sped to the restaurant to complete their job.
As their big Eldorado pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot, they spotted Bovan coming out of the bar. In Fiori’s own testimony, he said, “I ran over to his car and told him to put his hands above his head and not to move. He did and just looked at me. A car [Fiori’s Eldorado] made a turn, and he dropped his hands [and then he] came at me, lunged at me. I told him to stop at once, and he continued walking toward me and put his hand out to grab me. The first shot knocked him backward, and he was reeling. The second shot knocked him down. Then I fired seven consecutive shots at him. I think I heard him say after the second shot he had enough. Then I ran over toward my car, got in, and we left.”
Different witnesses interviewed at the time by the NBPD saw a lime-green Cadillac Eldorado convertible speed away. Bovan died in a pool of blood from what Orange County Coroner Walter R. Fischer said was “aspiration of blood due to gunshot wounds of the abdomen.”
Knowing they were next, Kieffer and Shea sought protection from the NBPD, spelling out the details of their scam. Within hours, Kulik was arrested in his Stutz Blackhawk with a pound of “China White” heroin in the back seat.
Kulik posted bail and was released the next day. The police followed him to the luxury apartment he shared with his wife, Elsie, under an assumed name, to arrest her as an accomplice. Kulik denied she was there, but when investigators searched the apartment, they found her hiding in a crawlspace. They also found a stash of marijuana and a bag of heroin with a street value of $1.5 million in 1977 dollars. Kulik was then rearrested, with bail set at $1.65 million.
Fiori’s conspicuous Eldo was not hard to trace, having been sold back to the Cadillac dealer he originally purchased it from. He was nabbed along with his two witness-protection buddies. He confessed to the murder and led investigators to the 9mm Walther pistol he used, which was recovered in Newport’s Back Bay with the trigger still cocked, according to Ray Resco’s trial testimony.
“We were surprised and shocked to hear what happened,” Justice says. “I think Bovan was so used to getting paid to race that a regular job just didn’t fit into his lifestyle. I think he was always looking for the easy buck.”
In the end, Fiori was sentenced to nine years in prison for second-degree murder, use of a firearm, and conspiracy to kidnap. Resco and Big Tony were sentenced to five years in prison for second-degree murder and conspiracy to kidnap. Their conviction was a black eye to the Witness Protection Program. Kulik got one year in prison to run concurrently with a separate five-year drug conviction. Davis was sentenced to six months in prison and three months probation. In 1979, he, along with 10 other devotees, was indicted on federal narcotics smuggling and income-tax evasion charges by the United States Attorney’s Office. Davis was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison. In April 1979, Alexander Kulik’s brother, David Kulik, was arrested in London for possession of 65 pounds of hashish oil.
“[Bovan] was different after he went to Orange County,” Robison says. “You kinda knew something bad was going to happen to him.” Says Hoag, “When we were at Blair’s, we had a fantastic time—all of us there. Steve was a good driver, a good mechanic, and he loved driving and racing. I just don’t know what happened, he was a really great guy.”
Information for this article was culled from Orange County Superior Court testimony, Statement of Facts, and interviews for case # C 38901; People vs. Joseph Davis, Joseph Gabriel Fedorowski, Roy Christopher Richard, Gerry Peter Fiori, Anthony Marone Jr., Raymond Resco, Akexander Kulik, Elsie Caban Kulik; Newport Beach Police Department records from Don Foreman, Orange County District Attorney’s Office; the Orange County Register, and the Los Angeles Times.
http://www.hotrod.com/articles/the-life-and-tragic-death-of-racer-steve-bovan/
Drag Racing, Drug Running, Kidnapping, the Mob, and Murder
Drag racing is dangerous, but there are worse things out there—things besides a bad crash that can get you killed. Funny Car pioneer Steve Bovan couldn’t have known what dangers lay outside of drag racing, but the sensational end to his life might have been avoided had he stuck with the danger he knew, instead of the danger he couldn’t have imagined.
Bovan was a barnstorming drag racer in the 1960s and early 1970s, something most racers dreamed of doing. Who wouldn’t love to have been a touring drag racer from that golden era?
Bovan raced his Junior Stock Corvette in the early 1960s with Dick Castro, winning NHRA C/Stock in 1964. He also raced a 1956 Chevy in Modified Production, and later in 1964 he was running a Max Wedge Mopar. But he wanted something faster.
Says fellow Blair’s Speed Shop alum Robbie Robison, “He was a tough kid out of a tough area: El Sereno, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles. He had gotten into trouble, but once he was at Blair’s he straightened himself out and even got married.” Working in the engine room at the famous Blair’s in Pasadena, California, he built most of its race motors at a time when the shop was pumping out straight-axle conversions and altered-wheelbase stockers. “It was an altered wheelbase assembly line,” says Blair’s Pete Poland. “And we built a lot of gassers; if you were into drag racing, Blair’s was heaven.”
“Bovan didn’t do drugs, wasn’t a womanizer, and was pretty fair with everyone, but you didn’t want to get him mad,” Robison says. One day a guy stole one of Bovan’s intake manifolds and went around to the front counter to try and sell it back to Blair’s. Someone recognized it and got Bovan. “When he saw this guy with his intake, he dropped him so fast I couldn’t believe it,” Robison says.
A quiet, big guy, Bovan’s success came from running first-class cars, instincts to win a few races, but also how to book match races, market himself and his car to snag sponsors, keep the car running, not wreck it, and then have something left to actually travel around from track to track.
“Back when you could cut a zero [reaction] time, he was consistently cutting zeros,” says Pete Eastwood, who, as a kid hanging out at Blair’s, would accompany Bovan with his Camaro Funny Car to local SoCal tracks like Irwindale and Lions. “He raced a lot in those days because he was good.” He would occasionally wrench and shoe for other racers, piloting the Samson Dart Funny Car, Nelson Carter’s Charger Funny Car, Al Vanderwoude’s Flying Dutchman, and other classic Funny Cars.
Bovan talked Don Blair into letting him and Blair’s fabricator, Mike Hoag, build and sponsor a big-block Chevy II to take on Jack Chrisman and his fuel-burning Comet in late-1964. Bovan built the 396ci, supercharged big-block running 100 percent alcohol. Says Hoag, “That was the first crate big-block on the West Coast.” Poland says, “We had a backdoor at Chevy through sprint car driver Sam Hanks, who was a good friend of Blair’s. Once we got the engine, all the Chevy guys like Bill Thomas and Hayden Profitt came by to see it—nobody had ever seen a big-block on the West Coast.”
Blair’s Jim Bishop handbuilt the intake manifold for the 6-71 blower and then had Doug Robinson at Horsepower Engineering finish it because Blair’s didn’t have a Heliarc welder. Besides exhibition racing, the car ran CC/FD in NHRA competition.
The car was initially built with a T-85 three-speed from a Pontiac but that transmission could not hold up to the torque of the bad, blown big-block. Next came an in-and-out box built at Henry’s Machine in Bellflower, California, running as a high-gear-only car. It wasn’t long before the automatic A/FX cars started running quicker, so Bovan went to Art Carr for one of his automatics and an adaptor plate. Robison remembers, “Once it got that automatic, it went a lot quicker.”
One of the unique features of the Chevy II was its Morris Minor torsion bar suspension. Hoag says, “It got everything out of the way. This was early on when those [Funny Cars] were just starting. I had never built anything like that before.” Considered the first and one of the most fondly remembered blown Chevy A/FX Funny Cars, it ran a best of 9.29 seconds at 160 mph.
Jay Lindsley was running an Anglia Gasser out of Blair’s and worked with Bovan. “His Chevy was a high-gear-only, smoke-the-tires, exhibition match racer. It was a booking car, where you booked into a three-race deal with a group of match racers,” Lindsley says.
Poland left his senior year of high school early to go barnstorming with Bovan in 1966 and 1967. “We’d start with a couple of match races somewhere on the East Coast, then go from there. It would be ‘Jungle’ Jim Liberman with his Nova and Lew Arrington with the Brutus GTO from San Jose, Claire Sanderson with Limefire, Dick Brannan and Paula Murphy.” Bovan was friends with Jack Nicholson, another pioneering drag-racer friend from Temple City, California, and copied down all of his drag-racing contacts from a black book. “Then he’d start calling and booking races with [locally known] Funny Car guys,” Poland says.
At the time, they would experiment with different timing or bigger blower pulleys. “Nothing was on full kill, 100 percent,” Poland says. “We could get $200 for three runs and that would last a week, then the other bookings for the week were profit. We ran 100 percent alcohol and would tip in 10 to 15 percent pop [nitro] when we needed it.” Adds Lindsley, “But later when he built the Camaro, he got much more serious.”
The Camaro was a state-of-the-art, flip-top Funny Car. Mike Hoag again built the chassis, running a blown and injected big-block 427ci Chevy first on alcohol, then nitro. “We were just going by the seat of our pants,” Hoag says. “The chassis was more like a sprint-car chassis, but with a dragster cage. I used Indy-type cross-bar torsion bars because we thought we could load the car easier, but it didn’t work. Don Borth and I did the tin work inside.” Hoag built shock towers into the chassis for the long, Logghe-type coilovers in case Bovan wanted to change, but he didn’t until around 1970.
Another unique feature was the driver’s door. “That body was thick and heavy,” Poland says. “Antique Fiberglass in Pomona built the body from a new, stripped Camaro. It took two people to lift it and another to prop it up, so that’s three. With the door, we didn’t have to lift the body for Bovan to get in.”
Again Bovan and Poland went match racing. “We took off in June and came back in September. We’d take a spare block, crank, some heads, two sets of rods and pistons, a trans, axles, and go.”
“He even raced the car in Hawaii,” Eastwood says.
“Steve was the nicest guy, and very mild-mannered,” says Ed Justice Jr., whose father’s company, Justice Brothers, sponsored Bovan’s Camaro for two years. “He was a local hero in SoCal, and I encouraged my dad to get involved with sponsorship. In fact, he sold petroleum products for us for a time, and everybody liked him.”
Says Lindsley, “He was a charismatic guy, but he wasn’t afraid to manhandle [somebody] if he needed something, and he was sort of secretive of his personal life.”
“Money was always a problem, so Bovan never wanted to break the car,” Poland says. “He wanted to go fast, but didn’t want to pay to go fast. Nobody had sponsors back then, except the big guys, so you had to make it work from your match-race winnings.”
By 1970 his winnings were dwindling and there were rumors of multiple, simultaneous car owners Bovan promised to split winnings with, plus other sketchy dealings. Says Eastwood, “He didn’t live extravagantly at all, but he went through a lot of money. He always needed more money.” By the end of 1970, Bovan was living in expensive Newport Beach, California. Says Hoag, “I feel Steve took advantage of Don Blair. He’d go on tour, win a few races, and when he came back, he’d always be broke. I don’t know what happened to the money.”
“He needed money to keep racing, but the money started corrupting him. He should have done like Jim Liberman where he would take his earnings, put a little aside, and put the rest back into the car so he could win some more,” Poland says.
Bovan’s best time on nitro and with an automatic was 7.10 seconds at 204 mph. Looking to increase the shelf life of his Funny Car, he went to friend Hoag, now with his own race-car operation called M&S Welding in Irwindale, California, to help him rework his Camaro to adapt a new second-generation Camaro body and a 426 Hemi/Art Carr Clutchflite transmission combo. Bovan also found new sponsors that included DA Custom Oil Distributors and a middle-school teacher from Phoenix.
Then in 1971 Bovan sold the Camaro. He moved to less expensive Costa Mesa, California, just up the coast a few miles from Laguna Beach and started working first for a VW repair shop and then for Delthic Auto Designs, a car-customizing shop in Costa Mesa. His transition from drag racer to drug dealer must have happened around this time, because he was on probation from an Arizona conviction for selling 1,200 pounds of marijuana. “Once we heard about Bovan’s drug stuff, I could see the connection to money,” Poland says.
At this point, our story takes a detour through a dark journey stemming from drug manufacturing and distribution taking place in Orange County, California, in the 1960s and 1970s, culled from Orange County Grand Jury and Orange County Superior Court testimony, as well as Newport Beach Police Department (NBPD) and Orange County District Attorney interviews of the time. Though some or all of this seems like something out of a movie, rest assured it’s all been testified to under oath.
Delthic was one of many small companies owned by Prasadam Distributors Inc. (PDI), an amalgam of businesses purchased with cash by Joseph Shelton Davis III or “Dritavarata,” as fellow Hare Krishnas religious followers called him. His companies were donating more than $2 million to a Hare Krishna temple in Laguna Beach, according to the NBPD.
The temple, known as International Society of Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, was an unorthodox devotional Krishna organization loosely based on the teachings of Bhagavad-gita and Srimad-Bhagavatam. The bulk of its assets came from Hindu-related products and fruit juices it sold; from a Laguna Beach restaurant called Govinda’s, a Krishna health-food restaurant; and other less conventional methods.
To the uninitiated, the image of Hare Krishna came from their ubiquitous presence in airports, where young pilgrims cloaked in robes wearing ponytails offered books, incense, and paper flowers to travelers for a donation.
This temple had an illicit drug history going back to the 1960s when Timothy Leary, the long-time proponent of the hallucinogen LSD, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a gang of hippie surfers affiliated to and led by Leary who espoused a communal, free-love lifestyle based in Laguna Beach, were cooking the stuff in the Laguna Beach canyons just down the road from ISKCON. LSD was sold through the temple, it was said, because Leary liked their association with Eastern spirituality [Greg Lynd testimony to Orange County Grand Jury, 1973]. Leary would ultimately be arrested in Laguna Beach in 1968 and sentenced in March 1970 to prison for possession of marijuana, LSD, and hashish.
By the mid-1970s, ISKON’s financial portfolio ran the gamut of enterprises, with at least one revenue stream from the distribution and sale of hash oil. They used pilgrims as drug mules, smuggling “honey oil” hidden in typewriter cases from Pakistan through international airports, based on trial testimony. A $1,000 liter bottle could be sold for $11,000 in the United States—a tenfold profit. Once through customs, pilgrims would fly from Pakistan into Canada, mail their luggage and typewriter cases home, then travel back to Laguna Beach.
Though a completely different region today, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Middle East was a very open society, easy for carefree travelers to trek along what was called the “hippie trail,” a route running from England through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. There were nomads on camels, scenic vistas, and travel was made easy with restaurants, cheap lodging, and Western food available all along the way.
The huge sums of cash from drug sales posed the typical problem of laundering it. Prasadam Distributors Inc. funneled ISKCON’s cash through its maze of companies in the classic money-laundering pattern. As PDI became more entrenched in the management and distribution of drugs, it even took on freelance “associates,” who gave a percentage of their profits in exchange for the front PDI afforded.
While PDI was taking in millions of dollars, its loose accounting allowed associates and small-time dealers to skim, including Bovan. He must have known the money’s source and the persistent rumor that PDI investor Alexander Kulik, a frequent visitor to PDI companies, kept more than $1 million in cash buried somewhere. Kulik was a Krishna follower and generous ISKCON donor. His “service” to them was curiously confidential, but enormously important and greatly appreciated.
Eventually, the organization realized Bovan was embezzling. Rather than confronting him directly, they chose to have someone outside take care of it. They contacted Frank Rossi, the brother-in-law of the wife of an ISKCON associate. With help from friends Anthony “Big Tony” Merone and Raymond Resco, Rossi was hired to facilitate Bovan’s quick return of the stolen money, according to Robert Emory’s testimony in court.
The United States Marshals Services newly formed Witness Protection Program had just relocated ex-mobsters Merone and Resco to Orange County after they gave testimony in New York against the mob. In exchange they got a new, clean life in California. Their lives and that of Bovan’s would soon intersect with tragic results.
Rather than resolving Bovan’s embezzling, they muscled in on the fast cash, bringing in Merone’s son, “Little Tony,” to help “manage” PDI’s businesses, squeezing Bovan out. Bovan was surely mad about his ouster, based on what he did next. Bovan assembled former Delthic employees Stan Kieffer and Robert Shea to help hatch a plan. Kieffer and Shea should have known better, having recently been roughed up by Rossi and ISKCON thugs over skimming suspicions themselves, from Newport Police interviews with a confidential informant identified only as “CI.”
Their plan was put on hold when the Huntington Beach Police Department arrested Bovan for drug possession with intent to sell. It wasn’t until August 1977 when Bovan was released and their plan could be hatched.
Bovan rigged Kulik’s car to run out of gas one night, where he waited with a .45-caliber automatic pistol to kidnap Kulik at gunpoint. Bovan shoved him into the back of a pickup, and with Kieffer driving, Bovan and a bound Kulik rode together in the small camper. Bovan tried to coax the location of Kulik’s cool cash with the butt of his loaded pistol. He denied he had a cash stash, but offered up $100,000 in a safe at PDI.
The next day, following instructions the kidnappers gave by phone, three cars were dispatched to the lookout on Interstate 5 just outside of San Clemente, California. Accompanying Big Tony was PDI’s Joe Fedorowski, known as “Gupta,” and Rossi in one car, Little Tony and Resco in the second car, and Joe Davis and another East Coast associate of the Merones named Jerry Fiori. En route, Little Tony and Resco helped themselves to an estimated $70,000 of the $100,000, assuming the kidnappers would not notice until after releasing Kulik.
When the rescuers pulled into the lookout parking lot and saw the pickup, out popped Bovan swinging his .45, crazy with rage, yelling and screaming at Rossi. One car in the trio blocked the exit while Bovan was calmed down and the cash could be laid on the truck’s seat. Then the kidnappers tried to leave without giving up Kulik. Rossi got out of his car and screamed at the truck to release Kulik or no one was leaving. As the kidnappers sped away, Kulik was kicked out the back, blindfolded with his hands taped behind his back. A car with Big Tony, Fiori, and Davis followed them down the interstate toward San Diego, where a cops-and-robbers-type running gun battle exploded.
Somehow the kidnappers successfully outran the gun-waving mobsters. No one was injured in the back-and-forth exchange of gunfire, according to trial testimony by Kieffer. Now Kulik and the ISKCON heads plotted their next move. Hoping to get revenge and eliminate three embezzlers in a single act, they offered Big Tony and Resco a $125,000 contract for the murder of Bovan, Kieffer, and Shea.
The plan was to capture the kidnappers and then kill them by injecting them with pure heroin, making it look like an overdose. Big Tony and his associates staked out Bovan’s home for weeks and just missed Kieffer and Shea, who were spotted by lookouts in a free food line at a Krishna temple in San Diego. Yet the kidnappers managed to elude their capture for more than a month.
Big Tony spread the word he would pay $1,200 to anyone who saw Bovan, according to testimony from Frank Rossi’s brother-in-law, Rick Willis. Finally, in the early misty morning hours of October 22, 1977, Bovan was seen at the bar of a Mexican restaurant in Newport Beach. Big Tony, Resco, and Fiori sped to the restaurant to complete their job.
As their big Eldorado pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot, they spotted Bovan coming out of the bar. In Fiori’s own testimony, he said, “I ran over to his car and told him to put his hands above his head and not to move. He did and just looked at me. A car [Fiori’s Eldorado] made a turn, and he dropped his hands [and then he] came at me, lunged at me. I told him to stop at once, and he continued walking toward me and put his hand out to grab me. The first shot knocked him backward, and he was reeling. The second shot knocked him down. Then I fired seven consecutive shots at him. I think I heard him say after the second shot he had enough. Then I ran over toward my car, got in, and we left.”
Different witnesses interviewed at the time by the NBPD saw a lime-green Cadillac Eldorado convertible speed away. Bovan died in a pool of blood from what Orange County Coroner Walter R. Fischer said was “aspiration of blood due to gunshot wounds of the abdomen.”
Knowing they were next, Kieffer and Shea sought protection from the NBPD, spelling out the details of their scam. Within hours, Kulik was arrested in his Stutz Blackhawk with a pound of “China White” heroin in the back seat.
Kulik posted bail and was released the next day. The police followed him to the luxury apartment he shared with his wife, Elsie, under an assumed name, to arrest her as an accomplice. Kulik denied she was there, but when investigators searched the apartment, they found her hiding in a crawlspace. They also found a stash of marijuana and a bag of heroin with a street value of $1.5 million in 1977 dollars. Kulik was then rearrested, with bail set at $1.65 million.
Fiori’s conspicuous Eldo was not hard to trace, having been sold back to the Cadillac dealer he originally purchased it from. He was nabbed along with his two witness-protection buddies. He confessed to the murder and led investigators to the 9mm Walther pistol he used, which was recovered in Newport’s Back Bay with the trigger still cocked, according to Ray Resco’s trial testimony.
“We were surprised and shocked to hear what happened,” Justice says. “I think Bovan was so used to getting paid to race that a regular job just didn’t fit into his lifestyle. I think he was always looking for the easy buck.”
In the end, Fiori was sentenced to nine years in prison for second-degree murder, use of a firearm, and conspiracy to kidnap. Resco and Big Tony were sentenced to five years in prison for second-degree murder and conspiracy to kidnap. Their conviction was a black eye to the Witness Protection Program. Kulik got one year in prison to run concurrently with a separate five-year drug conviction. Davis was sentenced to six months in prison and three months probation. In 1979, he, along with 10 other devotees, was indicted on federal narcotics smuggling and income-tax evasion charges by the United States Attorney’s Office. Davis was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison. In April 1979, Alexander Kulik’s brother, David Kulik, was arrested in London for possession of 65 pounds of hashish oil.
“[Bovan] was different after he went to Orange County,” Robison says. “You kinda knew something bad was going to happen to him.” Says Hoag, “When we were at Blair’s, we had a fantastic time—all of us there. Steve was a good driver, a good mechanic, and he loved driving and racing. I just don’t know what happened, he was a really great guy.”
Information for this article was culled from Orange County Superior Court testimony, Statement of Facts, and interviews for case # C 38901; People vs. Joseph Davis, Joseph Gabriel Fedorowski, Roy Christopher Richard, Gerry Peter Fiori, Anthony Marone Jr., Raymond Resco, Akexander Kulik, Elsie Caban Kulik; Newport Beach Police Department records from Don Foreman, Orange County District Attorney’s Office; the Orange County Register, and the Los Angeles Times.
http://www.hotrod.com/articles/the-life-and-tragic-death-of-racer-steve-bovan/
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