By Hank Nuwer
A miner from Greece lay mortally wounded in the brush at Cordova on September 27, 1914.
The victim called to a startled passerby.
“I’ll give you five dollars if you help me to the hospital,” he said.
The passerby ran to a nearby baseball field for assistance. One of the ballplayers at the Sunday ballgame was Dr. W. W. Council.
Council asked local citizen Charles Goodall, 50, a Norwegian immigrant who operated Cordova Lumber Company, to take the victim to the hospital with the aid of three men.
Angelo Velisalis, 22, told the rescue party what happened.*
He and a friend named Tony Lithetakis, also known as Tony Papas, had moved here from mining jobs at the Jumbo mine above Kennecott.
Lithetakis, 23, was a countryman from the Island of Crete. He had a scarred chin received in a knife fight.
They found rooms at Smith’s Lodging House.
The two went to a shop and purchased pistols. Lithetakis saw that Velisalis flash a $600 bankroll.
They went into a field to shoot targets. Lithetakis offered to clean his companion’s weapon.
Lithetakis slammed him over the head with it. He then shot him twice in cold blood at point-blank range.
As Visalis lost consciousness, Lithetakis went to sleep. The next morning, he abandoned his companion in the brushy gulch.
Dr. Council determined pronounced the patient’s condition critical. Visalis had a wound to the hand and a shattered vertebra. He had lost a lot of blood.
Deputy Brightwell went in pursuit. He subdued and captured Lithetakis at mile 30 of the Copper River and Northwestern railroad.
At a trial in Valdez in December, 1914, a paralyzed Velisalis testified on a hospital
stretcher against his former partner.
Lithetakis refuted the defense’s claim by that Velisalis started the fray. He denied
the defendant shot him in self-defense. Lithetakis’ motive was to murder him for $600.
The court found the defendant guilty. The judge sentenced Lithetakis to twenty years in Washington State’s McNeill’s Island penitentiary for assault with intent to kill. Prison records listed the height of prisoner number 2514 as only 5’ and ¾”.
The victim died before the year ended, according to a Cordova coroner’s report. No additional trial was held on the murder charge.
Deputy Marshal Carl Armstrong of Kodiak accompanied Lithetakis from Valdez to Tacoma on the steamer Admiral Evans, according to the Cordova Times of December 3, 1914.
Upon arrival, the prisoner bolted. The lawman brought him down with a single shot to the arm four inches above the elbow.
Lithetakis proved the opposite of a model prisoner at the McNeil Island prison. Unruly and abusive to authorities, he was transferred from Washington to maximum security Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
Lithetakis there attempted two more failed escape attempts.
The first was right after his arrival at Fort Leavenworth in 1915. Prisoner number 10373 hid in a railroad car after a coal delivery but was spotted at the gate entrance.
The second try was on February 16, 1917. After slipping away unseen from the stone shed at 1:15 p.m., he played a game of hide and seek with authorities inside the yard for 12 hours.
A tower guard named Doughty spotted him after midnight using a makeshift ladder to scale a wall. Doughty stopped him cold with a bullet to the hand.
The uncooperative prisoner refused to speak with the warden after the incident. His next workstation became the tin shop, according to the 1920 Census.
The 1930 and 1940 U.S. Census records reveal that Lithetakis was judged insane and admitted as a patient to Saint Elizabeths Hospital for psychiatric patients in Washington, D.C.
A fellow patient for a time in the 1950s was poet and Fascist Italy corroborator Ezra Pound.
Lithetakis died at the hospital in 1966, according to Social Security records.
*The spelling of the victim’s last name is taken from the official Cordova coroner probate record as newspapers of the day misspelled his name. The file is registered as “Velisalis Angelo, Cordova Coroner’s Inquest, 1914 Probate Record, OS 1325 418 Probate Case, File 181.”