By Paul Duggan and Manuel Perez-Rivas
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 15, 1997; Page A01

A long time ago—before she gained prominence as a hard-nosed land-development and political player in Maryland, and before she wound up charged in Montgomery County with a crime seemingly scripted from a TV movie— Ruthann Aron was a young waitress in a crowded diner called Dave’s.

She was Ruthann Greenzweig then, in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Dave was her father, David Greenzweig. And Dave’s was one of those streamlined, stainless-steel-and-neon diners with swivel stools and a counterman in white pouring coffee for a quarter. It was in the popular Catskill Mountains resort of South Fallsburg, N.Y., opposite the Rivoli theater on traffic-choked Main Street.

Almost 40 years later, Aron, 54, sits in jail, a Montgomery Planning Board member and former U.S. Senate candidate accused of trying to hire someone to kill her husband and a lawyer with whom she had tangled in court. She has said her South Fallsburg years help explain her evolution into a tenacious, and to many, abrasive, businesswoman and politician who rarely backed off from a fight. But those New York years shed no light on how she came to be accused of such a crime.

Dave’s was five miles up Route 40 from Monticello Raceway, so it served a Runyonesque railbird clientele, plus many of the thousands of working-class New Yorkers who fled summer in the city for Ruthann Greenzweig’s home town, filling its bungalow colonies and dozens of big hotels—Grossinger’s, the Concord, the Raleigh, Schank’s Paramount—when Jerry Lewis was headlining in the Catskills, along with Buddy Hackett and Sid Caesar.

"Oh, it was hustle-bustle, busy all the time," recalled Steve Proyect, who graduated from Fallsburg Central High School in 1964, several years after Aron. The town’s year-round population, now 13,000, swelled to more than 100,000 in the warm months back then. "We were much more streetwise" than young people in other outlying burgs, Proyect said. "We grew up a lot faster. We went to work earlier in life. ... We were a lot tougher."

In campaign interviews, Aron mentioned her youth in South Fallsburg as having contributed to her combative nature. "She gets in people’s faces in a very straightforward way and doesn’t tap dance too much," her husband, Barry, said during her 1994 Senate race.

She graduated from Cornell University; married Barry Aron, now a prosperous urologist; entered Catholic University’s law school at 33; was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1980; wet her feet, then sharpened her elbows, in the real estate development business; settled with her husband in a house now valued at more than $700,000 on two acres in Potomac; then entered Maryland’s 1994 U.S. Senate race, taking on Republican totem William E. Brock III in a primary and losing after a bitter campaign.

A Republican politician in Potomac said that as she came to know Aron well in the last decade, she thought her friend was projecting an image of toughness to distinguish herself from the many born-to-privilege women who lived around her in the wealthy community.

"She would always say she wasn’t a typical doctor’s wife—that doctors’ wives were boring, and she wanted to separate herself from that," this Republican said. "But I think there was more to it. I think she felt she couldn’t have their charm and sophistication, so she’d say they bored her."

Aron had a mean streak that can be traced to New York.

Leon Greenberg, a lawyer for her father, said David Greenzweig thought his daughter had "treated him like a dog all of her life," and he wrote her out of his will in 1987. "I specifically and unequivocally leave absolutely nothing for my daughter . . . who has been cruel to me," Greenzweig said in his will.

Greenzweig was beaten to death by a handyman in 1994, and although he and his daughter had been estranged for years, Aron frequently cited his murder during her Senate campaign in calling for tougher crime measures.

Greenberg said Aron sided with her mother, Frieda, in a bitter divorce in the 1960s and also became alienated from her brother, Denver area businessman Neil Greenzweig, with whom she has not reconciled. Her brother declined to be interviewed about her last week.

Choosing sides and ignoring conventions are resonating themes in Aron’s life.

She ran a biting primary campaign against Brock three years ago that angered many Maryland Republicans who said she was damaging the party.

After losing that 1994 race to Brock, Aron flouted political protocol by suing him for comments he made during the campaign. In her suit, Aron alleged that Brock had defamed her by mischaracterizing a verdict against her in a 1984 land-development suit. A jury found her liable for civil fraud and breach of contract, and Aron later paid the plaintiffs $174,606.

Baltimore lawyer Arthur G. Kahn represented the plaintiffs in that case and testified for Brock as he successfully defended himself against Aron’s defamation suit. But an appeals court ruled last month that Aron could seek a new trial, and Kahn likely would be subpoenaed to testify against her again.

Police said Kahn was one of two people Aron was trying to hire a hit man to kill for $20,000 when she was arrested Monday. The other was her husband, Barry Aron.

Police have not said what they think may have motivated Aron to want Kahn and her husband killed.

According to Barry Aron’s attorney, Ruthann has $2 million of her own money in personal bank accounts. Barry Aron has declined to comment, except to deny a suggestion by his wife on a jail questionnaire that she had been a victim of domestic abuse. Kahn also has declined to comment.

Ruthann Aron’s attorney, Barry Helfand, has sought to have her confined to a mental institution pending her trial on two counts of solicitation to murder, each punishable by up to life in prison. The murder-for-hire plot failed, authorities said, because a man from whom Aron allegedly sought help in finding a killer put her in touch instead with an undercover Montgomery County police officer.

As details of Aron’s case have unfolded, observers have tried to reconcile her public persona with her personal conflict.

"They say there’s only a thin line between madness and brilliance, and I think she exemplifies that," said Del. Richard A. La Vay (R-Montgomery), who moved in the same Potomac Republican circles as Aron. They were allies not long ago and planned to run for General Assembly seats on the same ticket in 1994. Then she decided to take on Brock and sought La Vay’s support, but La Vay already had pledged his support to Brock.

It ended their friendship. "She’d see me, and she wouldn’t even acknowledge my presence," La Vay said. "She just stopped talking to me. It was like an on-off switch—a total switch from being a friend to being an enemy. That just made you step back and wonder about her."

After Aron’s arrest, police said, they searched her car and home and found an array of incriminating items, including manuals on how to build silencers for guns and catalogues advertising forms of false identification.

Police said they think that Aron, a firearms collector who has spoken of wearing a holstered gun in her home, may have considered committing the crimes herself.

Investigators said they also found among her belongings what they suspect was a "hit list." It allegedly included the name of Alexandria lawyer John E. Harrison, who also has represented a client in a lawsuit against Aron and who also testified for Brock in the defamation case.

Harrison was unperturbed by the inclusion of his name on the list.

"In the business I’m in, I don’t necessarily see people at their best," he said in an interview. Montgomery authorities warned Harrison of possible danger. Aron has not been charged with seeking to harm him.

Acquaintances said Aron is intelligent and aggressive, a woman quick to burn bridges, personal and professional, when her needs demanded.

Steve Sandler, a partner at Sand ler-Innocenzi, a political media consulting firm in Alexandria, said Aron angered him so many times during her 1994 primary campaign that he ended their relationship, telling her not to bother paying the firm the nearly $16,000 he said it was owed.

"I just didn’t want anything more to do with her," Sandler said. Among other things, she was given to arguing vehemently over minor issues. "I found her a very, very difficult person to work with," he said.

But Sandler, like others, could not fathom what compelled her to walk off a golf course during a charity tournament last week and allegedly leave a $500 down payment for the killings in an envelope at the front desk of a Gaithersburg hotel. She was arrested about six hours later.

In the days before her arrest, she was working to launch a new career as a mediator of court disputes, according to sources in the Montgomery County legal community.

Aron, a lawyer, had spent little time practicing law over the years. But she was revising her resume and preparing a letter seeking court appointments to mediate disputes before they become full-blown lawsuits. She had even met recently with local Democrats to discuss switching her party affiliation and running as a Democrat for a County Council seat.

"Knowing those things she was planning ahead," a friend said, "maybe she was trying to plan for the future."

Staff writers Charles Babington and R.H. Melton contributed to this report.