(Editor’s note: This story was originally published on June 23, 2001)
It seemed to his friends that making a deal made Zack.
Take Zack’s Ford Explorer.
He bragged to his friend Joe Szany about how he was able to buy the sport utility vehicle for the same price a Ford employee would pay. He had turned an equipment sale he made at Ford into a favor.
“That turned Jeff on,” Szany said.
But one week ago, as Zack was about to fill up that same Explorer at BJ’s Wholesale gas station near Chapel Hill, a motorcyclist—dressed head-to-toe in dark clothing with a helmet—pulled up, walked over to Zack’s SUV and shot the former Israeli paratrooper in the head at point-blank range. The cyclist then jumped back on the bike and disappeared into traffic.
In the seven days since the broad-daylight murder, Akron detectives have worked around the clock, interviewing dozens of Zack’s relatives and friends. They have suggested that Zack may have been the target of a hitman.
They have been probing Zack’s past to try to find out who might have killed him or wanted him dead.
Their search has turned up plenty. The Stow man was a paratrooper in the Israeli army who spoke five languages and had dual citizenship with Israel. He was someone who had a conviction in the early 1980s for his part in an escort agency using minors as prostitutes and a more recent conviction for kissing a teen-age clerk in a hardware store in Stow. He was a man who fought with his neighbors and one who, according to his friend Szany, most loved women, money and making deals.
Zack’s family members also are speculating over who might have killed him.
“It could have been a million things,” his mother, Elayne Zack of Phoenix, said yesterday.
She said she thinks many of her son’s problems stemmed from his feelings about his father.
Zack’s biological father severed ties with him when he was only 8. Elayne Zack remarried and Zack thought of her second husband as a father, but she still thinks he never got over his father leaving.
“It was the reason why he behaved the way he did,” she said.
His mother said she feels partly responsible for her son’s problems because she should have pushed him into dealing with his feelings about his father.
“I created this monster,” she said.
Despite his troubles, Elayne Zack emphasized that her son had a good side. She talked, for example, about his dedication to his 12-year-old son. She said Zack once helped director Steven Spielberg find the names of people who survived the Holocaust.
He “had a kind heart and was an extremely giving person,” said his brother Marc Zack, who also lives in Arizona.
“He meant no harm to anyone,” Marc Zack said. “He sought attention and that was unfortunately his demise.”
Family members admit they didn’t know some of the things that have surfaced since Zack’s murder last week.
“Unfortunately, the last (several) years, it all went to hell,” Marc Zack said. “He was an adult and should be responsible for his actions. It’s hard to be angry at someone who’s dead. You have to forgive.”
Relatives say the Detroit-born Zack went to Israel in the mid-1970s because he was unhappy attending college in Michigan.
He wanted to become a pilot in the vaunted Israeli air force, but couldn’t because he did not have perfect eyesight. Instead, Zack became a paratrooper and later joined Israeli intelligence.
He returned to Phoenix after leaving Israel, and that’s where he became embroiled in an escort agency that police determined was a front for prostitution.
When he was arrested and charged in 1982 with recruiting two girls for the service—ages 15 and 16—he told investigators that he was lured into the operation with the promise of “large sums of money.”
Zack admitted knowing that he was in the prostitution business, but, according to court records, he was assured by one of the escort service owner’s lawyers that “this type of activity was a misdemeanor, (so) he believed his activities were justified.”
Zack, who also admitted to having sex with the teens himself, struck a deal with prosecutors and testified against two others.
Investigators recommended no prison time and found nothing in Zack’s background to indicate he would have trouble in the future.
“It appears the defendant was totally motivated by the possibility of quick and large monetary gain,” Deputy Adult Probation Officer Terry Fischer reported in his pre-sentence investigation.
Elayne Zack said her son’s biggest problem was that he did not know when to keep his mouth shut. Often, she said, he did not intend to act on what he said, but he would not think before speaking.
“He had a temper and he had a big mouth,” she said. “He never learned to shut his mouth and, ultimately, that is what got him into vicious trouble.”
Those who knew Zack best, however, say his prowess for talking helped him during his life with one thing: selling.
In late 1995, Joe Szany made Jeff Zack his first hire at Lindemann Recycling—a German firm looking to start up in America. Szany said Zack was a tenacious salesman.
“He didn’t give up,” Szany said. “He could sense, almost to a fault, a hot prospect vs. someone who was wasting his time.”
Zack sold a lot of recycling equipment from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, some of which was worth more than $1 million.
“Jeff was a good closer,” he said.
Szany left Lindemann in 1997 for American Baler near Toledo, where he is now the company’s vice president of sales.
“(Zack) cried about it,” Szany said. “It took me back that someone would care about working for me so much that they would cry. I tried to console him for about an hour.”
He said Zack became upset with him when Szany was unable to create a job for his former employee at American Baler. Zack lost his job at Lindemann when the company was sold.
Szany, who also remembered his friend as someone who frequently rode his bike along the Towpath Trail, said this week that he hadn’t spoken with Zack in several years.
But he still remembered that his friend “always had something going. He was a guy who could talk himself into doing anything.”
“I had no problem getting along with him,” Szany said. “I never saw him take a drink, but Jeff could hang in there all night with people. He was an awful lot of fun.”
As Akron police try to figure out why Zack was gunned down, they likely will consider what Szany says were Zack’s three passions: women, money and making deals.
But what, if anything, those had to do with his death is a mystery as elusive as the dark-clad figure who one week ago ended his life.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Family fears man’s vices tied to death
Reporting by Stephen Dyer and Stephanie Warsmith / Akron Beacon Journal
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