By Dan Beyers and Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 11, 1997; Page A15

The man Ruthann Aron allegedly turned to for help finding a hit man was not exactly a stranger to such matters. William H. Mossburg Jr. once was identified as the target of a murder-for-hire plot.

At least that's what Montgomery County police said when they charged Mossburg's son two years ago with offering an undercover police officer $40,000 to kill his father. The elder Mossburg said he did not believe the story or the taped conversation that police said implicated his son. He said it was all a set-up. A grand jury considered the police allegations and declined to indict.

So it's easy to imagine Mossburg's surprise on June 1, when, according to court documents and three sources familiar with the investigation, Aron met him in the restaurant at the Courtyard by Marriott in Rockville and told him she wanted to have someone "eliminated." She did not name the intended victims, the documents said.

Mossburg "was very taken aback" and tried to talk her out of it, but she persisted, and he told her he would get back to her, one official said. When he did, it was as a confidential informant for the county police department he once discredited, the sources said.

Aron was charged Monday with trying to hire a hit man to kill her husband, urologist Barry Aron, and Baltimore lawyer Arthur G. Kahn.

Mossburg was mum yesterday about whether he had a role in Aron's arrest. "The only thing I can say at this time is no comment," he said. "That's what I've been advised to say."

He said he first met Aron about 1993 through county politics. Both were active in real estate and development circles at the time. Aron was a brash developer and a member of the county Planning Board who was seeking to become the Republican nominee for a seat in the U.S. Senate. William Mossburg, a down-home sort partial to baseball caps and flannel shirts, was knee-deep in a long-running feud with the county over his family's trash operations on the outer fringes of Rockville.

In an interview after Aron's arrest, Mossburg acknowledged that it felt odd to be in the position he now finds himself in, given his often-strained relationship with county authorities.

"It's kind of a shocker, I tell you. Kind of a shocker," he said without elaborating.

Few people have gone toe-to-toe with county government with such anti-establishment fervor as Mossburg. Since the 1950s, his family had operated what he called a waste transfer center on Travilah Road but what neighbors and county officials said looked and smelled more like an illegal dump. Not until a fire broke out in 1994 did Mossburg shut down the facility under duress. Later, a Montgomery County Circuit Court judge ordered Mossburg to pay the county $2.6 million to reimburse its cleanup costs. His crusade might have ended if he had not won permission from the county Board of Appeals in April to build a new trash facility on a two-acre parcel in Rockville. County officials dispute his ownership of the land, saying the property was auctioned off at a sheriff's sale this year for $100 after the county seized it as partial payment of the $2.6‚million judgment.

Amid the legal wrangling, in September 1995, police arrested Christopher Mossburg, 26, on charges he tried to hire a hit man to kill his father. At the time, police theorized that the younger Mossburg was concerned that his father was squandering his inheritance to pay the legal costs of his feud with the county.

Police said that an undercover officer wearing a microphone met Christopher Mossburg in the parking lot of Wheaton Plaza and that the two discussed several ways the slaying could be carried out.

Authorities later played an audio tape of the conversation for William Mossburg, but he refused to help prosecutors or answer questions in front of a grand jury. "My son got used as a scapegoat by a police informant, and then he was set up by the police department," William Mossburg was quoted as saying in a Washington Post article last year. "It was just a bunch of mumbo jumbo."

It was a different story this month.

According to two Montgomery sources, Mossburg telephoned the FBI the day after his 3 p.m. June 1 meeting with Aron and, two days later, began working with police. The statement of charges filed in connection with Aron's arrest said a confidential informant allowed police to monitor his phone conversations with Aron, as well as several subsequent meetings.

On June 7, the informant gave Aron a telephone number to call to reach a hit man, who the charging document states was an undercover police officer. She was arrested when she went to a pay phone at the Courtyard by Marriott to return the undercover officer's telephone page, police said.

Staff writers Susan Levine and Manuel Perez-Rivas contributed to this report.