“Black Widow” Barbara Kogan is off to prison — and the mistress has the final word.
In an emotion-drenched letter read aloud at Kogan’s sentencing yesterday, Mary-Louise Hawkins revealed herself as more than just “the other woman” in a fatal Upper East Side love triangle.
“An act of wanton evil,” Hawkins wrote the Manhattan court in the letter, describing for the first time publicly how she felt about the murder, for which Kogan was sentenced to 12 to 36 years in prison yesterday.
Hawkins was just 28 in 1990 when Kogan paid a hit man $40,000 to gun down her millionaire husband, George Kogan, as he carried groceries home to Hawkins’ East 69th Street apartment.
“The wife did it!” the building doorman recalled Hawkins screaming as she ran to her dying lover’s side.
It was Hawkins who wept at George’s hospital bed as he lay dying from the three bullets to the back fired by Kogan’s hired assassin. Kogan, meanwhile, stayed home and paid a beautician $500 to do her hair.
In the two decades that passed as Manhattan prosecutors pursued the case, Hawkins moved to Europe and married but kept in touch with George’s family.
“This is a moral tale that has no positive lesson whatsoever to offer,” Hawkins wrote in her letter, read aloud by prosecutor Joel Seidemann.
She saved her most tender sympathies for George’s sons, Scott and William, who were in their early 20s when their mother killed their father.
“That they have had to live with their mother’s depravity all this time has surely taken its toll on both men in ways they cannot begin to imagine,” Hawkins wrote.
Kogan, 67 — dubbed the “Black Widow” for both her venomous soul and her penchant for black clothing — was sentenced yesterday to serve a minimum of 10 more years on top of the two she’d already served awaiting trial.
She had spent most of the last 20 years a free woman — even as her former divorce lawyer was convicted of murder for brokering the hit — enjoying the $4.3 million proceeds from the four insurance policies she had taken out on George’s life.
But the Black Widow was a portrait in gray yesterday, from her charcoal suit to her Brillo-y hair, pulled back in a ponytail.
She wore a countenance of granite, saying little at the sentencing except for a quiet “No” when asked by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Roger Hayes whether she wanted to speak.
Her son Scott and George’s niece had plenty to say when their turns came to take the podium.
The niece, Taryn Kogan, 31, railed at Kogan tearfully, calling her “a murderer and a villain.”
Trembling as he turned to his mother, who didn’t meet his eyes, Scott said of his parents, “I loved them both. I still do.”