ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- On what would be the last day of his life, Robert Pfeil listened calmly from a hospital bed as his wife related how police believed his brother-in-law had paid an assassin $10,000 to have him killed.
'No kidding,' the senior Alaska Airlines pilot said softly as Marianne Pfeil described the plot. 'No kidding.'
By all appearances, Pfeil's ruined body was healing from the three large-caliber bullet wounds he had received nearly a month earlier in a posh South Anchorage neighborhood.
Pfeil (pronounced file) knew he would be paralyzed and his career ended. But as he lay in the Mayo Clinic research hospital in Rochester, Minn., it appeared he would live.
The next morning, a blood clot worked its way into one of his lungs, killing the 55-year-old Alaskan.
Thus ended a feud that had begun nearly a decade earlier when Pfeil's sister, Muriel, divorced wealthy Anchorage businessman-attorney Neil S. MacKay.
Pfeil's death ended a chapter in a tale of mayhem marked by a bloodfeud, an unsolved murder, courtroom battles, numerous arrests and a deadly gangland-style attack.
MacKay was 28 and fresh out of law school when he arrived in Anchorage in 1951 with his first wife, Barbara. It was a small town then, one of a few in a giant territory unspoiled by the oil bonanza that would come decades later.
Instead of practicing law, MacKay opened a mortuary in a building on Fourth Avenue.
Slowly, MacKay began an extensive foray into the real estate market, eventually amassing a fortune. In 1965 he divorced his wife and three years later married Muriel Pfeil.
But by 1974, bitter divorce proceedings were under way and a bizarre side of MacKay began to surface publicly. He barricaded himself in the penthouse of his 14-story downtown building and refused to appear in court, violating a judge's order.
The divorce was granted in 1975, and Muriel won one of the state's largest divorce settlements -- $750,000, plus $500 monthly support for their son, Neil P. 'Scotty' Mackay.
MacKay filed suit to gain custody of Scotty, but his wife won the case.
Muriel was 41, a wealthy, attractive woman with a successful travel business. A newspaper account referred to her as a 'hard charger, a tough businessperson and a good mother.'
On Sept. 30, 1976, she finished some early afternoon business and slid into the driver's seat of her new orange Volvo, which was parked in a busy downtown Anchorage lot. The ensuing explosion under the car's hood rocked the area and and left Muriel dead.
Nothing like that had ever happened in the far north city before, and for 10 years the homicide has remained unsolved.
From the time of Muriel's death, Robert Pfeil and MacKay squared off in what would be a protracted battle over Scotty and control of his inheritance. Pfeil was the executor of Muriel's will and the manager of the boy's $1 million trust fund.
Stormy court hearings continued into the fall of 1977 as Pfeil fought to wrest Scotty from MacKay's custody.
Hauled into court were psychiatric records in which MacKay was said to suffer from 'acute organic brain syndrome,' a condition Pfeil's lawyers said caused memory and speech dysfunction, and impaired ability to think and reason. They pushed hard to persuade the court that MacKay could never be a fit parent.
MacKay finally ignored court orders and left Alaska with Scotty on Dec. 11, 1977, fleeing first to Hawaii and later to the South Pacific atoll of Likiep in the Marshall Islands.
With Scotty hidden on Likiep, MacKay refused to disclose the boy's whereabouts and was jailed briefly in Hawaii until he agreed to return the boy to Alaska.
MacKay, however, eventually prevailed with the help of his Los Angeles attorney, Robert Kaufman, and won custody of Scotty over the resurgent objections of Robert Pfeil.
The Pfeils remained in Alaska while MacKay and Scotty lived in a condominium in the Ilikai Hotel complex in Waikiki, but the miles between the two sides did nothing to dissipate the enmity.
MacKay believed Pfeil was diverting money from the estates of Muriel and Scotty, according to court documents filed last week.
Pfeil and MacKay refused to speak to each other and instead dueled through lawyers. In 1984 MacKay filed a federal lawsuit in Anchorage accusing Pfeil, his wife, Marianne, and Scotty's grandmother, Muriel C. Pfeil, of harassment.
A federal judge said the case had no merit and summarily dismissed it in early October. By then, according to police files, MacKay had devised a new plan to end the Pfeil nuisance. The key to that plan was a man named Gilbert 'Junior' Pauole.
Pauole, who had served time in Hawaii for heroin possession, armed robbery and firearms violations, came to Anchorage in 1979 from Seattle, where he had managed a bar owned by another convicted felon named Frank Colacurcio.
His assignment in Anchorage was to manage a strip joint called The Wild Cherry, which lost its liquor license last year after the state determined Colacurcio held an illegal hidden interest in the establishment.
Paoule then repainted its exterior and renamed it The Fancy Moose, serving soft drinks while nude dancers still gyrated to the beat of glitter rock disco, oblivious to the somber history of the building that had once been Neil MacKay's mortuary. It is still his building.
Paoule has said he has been acquainted with his landlord for several years and recently described him as a friend.
Earlier this year, according to the Anchorage Police Department, that 'friendship' took a new twist when MacKay hired Pauole for $10,000 to have Robert Pfeil killed.
On the night of Oct. 12, five shots from a 45-caliber handgun pierced the door on the driver's side of the car driven by Pfeil, who had just flown a Boeing 737 in from Nome and was 500 feet from his driveway.
The men who drove off in the darkness left Pfeil slumped over the wheel of his car.
In the weeks that followed, police looked into the possibility that the bombing of Muriel Pfeil's car and the shooting of her brother were related.
The real break came when an unidentified woman passed on information about a stolen .45-caliber handgun, the kind used in the attack on Pfeil.
Six people were later arrested -- five in separate collars in Alaska and MacKay, who was nabbed at his Honolulu penthouse and accused of masterminding the contract killing.
The suspects include the alleged triggerman, a strip club bouncer nicknamed 'Terminator;' the alleged getaway driver; and a man said to have loaned the attackers his Lincoln Continental and then tried to have it crushed into an unrecognizable piece of metal. All were charged with murder.
The man who loaned the murder weapon escaped with a theft charge. And Pauole, in exchange for his help in pinning the murder on MacKay, was given an opportunity to plead to the lesser charge of attempted murder.
A Hawaii judge considering a request from the Anchorage district attorney for MacKay's extradition to Alaska was told last week that MacKay, now held on a $25 million cash-only bail, had been tricked into admitting his guilt.
The judge ruled MacKay must remain in custody pending a decision on Alaska's extradition request, which could come this week.
