In Search of the Sleuth

His son followed him into the business, but not before some lost bootlegging years in prohibition-era New York. Ed Pankau says his father worked for Dutch Schultz, the legendary "beer baron of the Bronx," and once got arrested running Johnnie Walker from Canada. Ed's younger brother Robert, a radio journalist in Sarasota, Florida, cannot confirm those particular details, but acknowledges that his father was not a saint.

"My dad had a lot of secrets he didn't necessarily share with all of us," he says.

Their mother, Barbara, worked as a waitress at the Pankau restaurant, where she met their dad. After getting married, the couple bought an inn in Westchester County and converted the downstairs into a restaurant and bar. The family lived upstairs. Outside they set up a beer garden and hot dog stand, enticing passing motorists with their German sausages and sauerkraut.

Ed was the first child to arrive, followed about three years later by Tom, and Robert a few years after that. The brothers recall growing up amid the sounds of the "Count Basie-style" music and general good times of the beer garden, restaurant and bar. Each fall, the Pankaus packed up and headed down to Naples, Florida, to enjoy the warmer weather.

"Right where Al Capone [wintered]," Ed Pankau says with relish.

The family completed this annual migration each year until their mother grew weary of the road. So when Ed was 12, the family relocated permanently to the Sunshine State. Their dad continued to show a flair for enterprise, opening a popular restaurant and bar in the Orlando area called the House of Steaks, a whiskey and cigar chophouse that attracted celebrities such as Danny Thomas. The whole clan, boys included, pitched in running the joint.

"It wasn't a Ward Cleaver-type upbringing in terms of having Mom home and Dad working eight to five," Robert Pankau says.

Neither parent was particularly religious or put much emphasis on their children's schooling. They did, however, instill a love of independence. Ed Pankau still cracks up recalling how their father, with his thick German accent and LBJ-esque mug, smoothly worked the graft and other seamy aspects of the bar-and-restaurant business to his advantage.

"My father was a crook," he says with affection. "I watched him do every illegal act there was."

Robert Pankau remembers his older brother as an ultracompetitive kid, determined to be the best at whatever he did. He says Ed became an expert in martial arts, earning a black belt in karate and frequently taking the top prize in judo competitions. Seven years his senior, Ed taught him a few moves, and with those, Robert was able to take down boys who were older and more skilled.

"It gave me a great deal of respect for him as an older brother and a teacher," Robert says. "It made me proud to be his brother."

Their father wanted Ed to stick around after high school and run the House of Steaks. But Ed had scrubbed one too many dishes by that point and had no patience for the business.

"I said, 'I'll burn the place to the ground.' "

Restless, he joined the marines. He also set down a road of self-invention, where fact and fiction seem to have become forever intertwined. To this day Robert Pankau is under the distinct impression that his brother became a Green Beret and served in Vietnam.

"I saw all the military patches and the berets and everything else that gave me every indication that he was. I have no reason to believe otherwise," he says.

It appears Ed Pankau has been telling that story for much of his life. And he's gotten burned for it. In their 1998 book Stolen Valor, authors B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley expose dozens of individuals, some famous, who have falsified their Vietnam records. They dedicate several pages to Pankau. Based on open records requests to the National Personnel Records Center, they determined that Pankau served in the army from June 10, 1963, to July 23, 1964. He was not a Green Beret. He was a parachute rigger whose highest active-duty rank was that of private first class.

"The closest he came to the war was during an eighteen-day stint attached to the 1st Special Forces Group, packing chutes in Okinawa, more than a thousand miles from Vietnam," they write.

"When a guy like Pankau claims to have served shoulder to shoulder with people who fought in that war, or died in that war, they're committing a sacrilege," says Dallas-based Burkett, who earned the Bronze Star Medal for his Vietnam service.

After the war, Pankau went on to serve many years in the army reserves, earning high praise for his service. Today he is careful when discussing his early military days, acknowledging that he wasn't in Vietnam. He insists, however, that he was in Okinawa for several months and that he was in fact a Green Beret.

In 1968 Pankau enrolled at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer, but an introductory criminology course made him rethink his future. He found himself engrossed by discussions of criminal behavior and envisioned some kind of career in law enforcement. He married a fellow student but will describe the relationship only as "one of those bad things you want to block out of your mind."