The Joys of Private Enterprise

On Sept. 24, 1955, Stanislaw Lopuszynski walked into the office of a Warsaw doctor and complained of a pain in his head. He had good reason to complain: there was a bullet in his skull. After the slug was removed, police came to Lopuszynskrs bedside and patiently reconstructed his movements of the few previous days. Lopuszynski remembered driving near Cracow with a friend named Wladyslaw Mazurkiewicz after a night of heavy drinking. A loud explosion had suddenly awakened him from a snooze. "It's nothing," his companion had said. "I just wanted to scare you with a firecracker."

Police decided to call on the man whose firecracker was made of lead.

Just Eight. Last week, as a result of Lopuszynski's strange tale, Wladyslaw Mazurkiewicz stood before a Cracow courtroom in one of the most bizarre murder cases in Poland's history. The Polish Communist press, usually confined to turgid polemics, devoted column after column to full and sensational reports by 80 reporters covering the trial ("It is refreshing to read again about ordinary human frailties," said one Pole). Some spectators paid as much as 2,000 zlotys (three months' pay for a workman) for a black-market ticket to get into the packed courtroom. Mazurkiewicz, the center of all the attention, is a 48-year-old ex-army officer who had a reputation in Cracow as an elegant, free-spending man about town with good connections. His present fame, however, was centered on the charge that he had done in six people and had had a go at two others in an astounding murder marathon that rivaled Alec Guinness' movie Kind Hearts and Coronets. Since the trial began, authorities had received denunciations accusing Mazurkiewicz of some 50 other unsolved murders. "People are crediting me with too much," he said modestly. "I planned only eight murders. I want the record straight."

Mazurkiewicz murdered for money to finance his high living, usually by drawing his victims into shady black-market deals, the real source of much of his own income. In 1943, Mazurkiewicz failed in his first attempt, when poison did not work on a Polish underground officer. He profited by this first distressing experience, put so much cyanide in the vodka of a black-marketeer that the fellow gave up his ghost and $1.200 with heartening dispatch. Victim No. 2, carrying 160.000 zlotys, was shot and his body dumped in a river.

Victim No. 3 proved to be almost more trouble than he was worth: Mazurkiewicz was seen disposing of the body. But influential friends in the prosecutor's office intervened, and witnesses gladly changed their testimony under duress. Mazurkiewicz grandly threw a huge party for the prosecutor, police and witnesses in his handsome apartment -partly with the 225,000 zlotys lifted from Victim No. 3.

Two in a Garage. Victim No. 4 was a gentleman named Jerzy de Laveaux who lived in the apartment above Mazurkiewicz and possessed, among other things, a 42-lb. solid gold bar, a ten-carat diamond worth $5,000 and perhaps $10.000 in American greenbacks (the standard black-market medium). Mazurkiewicz invited him into the woods to swap currencies, then murdered him and dumped his body in the river.

With his eye on the balance of De Laveaux's wealth, Mazurkiewicz began to woo his widow. Rebuffed at first, Mazurkiewicz persisted. At last he persuaded her to give him several thousand dollars for safekeeping by warning her that he had a tip that the secret police were about to raid her home. When she asked for the money's return, Mazurkiewicz shot her -and her sister for good measure -and buried them both beneath the concrete floor of his garage.

Only when the bungled attempt to kill Lopuszynski cut short Mazurkiewicz' promising career did police get curious enough to discover the two bodies. That raised the question of why there had been no earlier investigations into the disappearance of Mazurkiewicz' victims. With considerable embarrassment, the Communists admitted that so many people had been snatched away by the secret police that it never occurred to anyone to suspect foul play by private enterprise.

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