Larry Skiba lived a dual life. He was the gregarious back-slapper who liked practical jokes and meeting for coffee with the regulars at Martin's Fruit Basket, a restaurant in White Oak. He was also the man who paid to have his friend killed in a plot to collect on a $90,000 life insurance policy. Those two worlds will be on display Tuesday when Skiba, 52, who pleaded guilty in June to a charge of interstate murder for hire, is sentenced by Senior U.S. District Judge Gustave Diamond in Pittsburgh. There will be the man who invested in poker machines, consorted with mob enforcers and took out fraudulent life insurance policies on his friends, including Robert Cooper, 68, who was killed Dec. 8, 2000, by the hit man Skiba hired. And there will be the man who often helped out a monastery by doing electrical work for free or below cost. Skiba had done electrical work since the 1970s for St. Paul of the Holy Cross monastery, off 18th Street on the South Side Slopes. "I was shocked as anybody on the day that he was arrested," said John Colaizzi, a business manager at the monastery. Colaizzi recalled that once Skiba heard him make an offhand remark that he wished the monastery had enough money to pay to have the chapel's electrical fans cleaned. When Colaizzi returned the next day, he was surprised to see Skiba finishing up the cleaning job. "He said, 'Don't worry about it. It's on me,'" Colaizzi recalled. Scott Apter, 57, a longtime neighbor of Skiba's on Victoria Drive in White Oak, said he still believes that Skiba is innocent and pleaded guilty only to avoid the death penalty, not because he did it. "This is one of the heartbreaks of my life," said Apter, who so trusted Skiba that he gave him the keys to his home. "If a wire fell down at your house in the middle of a snowstorm, Larry was the type of guy who would be out there with a ladder, and he would have the wire up before you knew it," Apter said. "He would just knock himself out for his neighbors." Skiba avoided the death penalty by agreeing to help prosecutors convict the hit man -- Eugene DeLuca, a slight, white-haired senior citizen from Oak Lawn, Ill., a Chicago suburb. Skiba is facing about 25 to 30 years in prison, Diamond said in a ruling last month, but he could get significantly less time for cooperating with federal authorities. A federal jury in January convicted DeLuca, an informant who helped Chicago-area law enforcement authorities bust up high-stakes gambling rings. The day after his conviction in Cooper's slaying, DeLuca, 69, hanged himself in the Allegheny County Jail. A former business owner and electrical contractor originally from Glassport, Skiba is well-known in the Mon Valley. Wherever he went, fire, death and insurance fraud seemed to follow, according to court records. In his youth, he was known as "Heat" because he liked to burn things, and three businesses that he had owned as an adult were damaged by fire. He collected more than $100,000 in insurance after his Glassporter Hotel and Lounge burned in 1993. Michael George, 36, died in that blaze. A Laundromat Skiba owned in McKeesport burned in 1996. Federal investigators suspected the cause was arson, but no one was ever charged. He gave an employee of the Laundromat, John Novosedliak Jr., 23, a handgun that Novosedliak then used to kill himself. Novosedliak, known as "Whirlybird" because he was mentally slow, walked into a mechanic's garage on Fifth Avenue in McKeesport in March 1998 and shot himself in the head with a .45-caliber pistol. He had previously threatened suicide. Skiba, who denied responsibility for Novosedliak's death, collected about $91,000 from a life insurance policy he had taken out on the man. "You meet Skiba, and right away, you think he's the nicest guy in the world," said the dead man's father, John Novosedliak Sr. "But all he is is just a sweet talker. He has a background." Novosedliak said his son so respected Skiba that he stopped listening to his parents, who now think Skiba planted thoughts of suicide in their son's mind and gave him the weapon to follow through. "Skiba had the upper hand," the father recalled. "Our son listened to him more than us." In the murder-for-hire plot, Cooper, a used car salesmen, was killed in broad daylight in the parking lot of the Olympia Shopping Center in McKeesport. He was shot in the head five times while sitting in the passenger seat of one of his used cars. Skiba said he had loaned Cooper $35,000, which went toward creating a marijuana farm in Canada. Cooper never repaid the money, so Skiba said he decided to take out three life insurance policies on Cooper. Skiba testified that Cooper already was a marked man because he had crossed Charles Foster, whom Skiba described as a Mafia enforcer. Foster was the boyfriend of Skiba's cousin, Barbara Strager. Skiba said he was simply expediting Cooper's death by offering DeLuca $25,000 from the life insurance policies to shoot him. Skiba gave DeLuca the gun and paid for his hotel room at the Palace Inn in Monroeville. Skiba was there for the killing. "All of a sudden I hear 'pop, pop,'" Skiba testified. "Then he opened the door, and then I hear 'pop, pop, pop.' I said this guy is like -- he just kept shooting. I said, 'Jesus Christ.'" Skiba said he drove DeLuca back to his car and wanted to get away from him as soon as possible. "I felt if there was one more bullet in there, you know, I felt if there was one more bullet in the gun, it was for me," Skiba testified. "And then I thought he wouldn't do anything because I was the cash cow." On Dec. 5, 2000 -- three days before Cooper's slaying -- rags were found stuffed inside the flue pipe of Foster's furnace. Skiba had taken out $15,000 in life insurance policies on Foster. Skiba's friends said the man they knew did impressions of friends. He was the friendly electrician who lived on Victoria Drive with his wife, Sherry, a school teacher, their teenage son and Skiba's older brother Eugene. Skiba did lighting work for Terry Farrell, 57, a lawyer in the White Oak area. "I just thought that they had the wrong guy," said Farrell, who often joined Skiba in walking their dogs in Renziehausen Park in McKeesport. "It was not the Larry Skiba I knew." During the cross examination by DeLuca's defense lawyer, Charles Porter Jr., Skiba admitted he had lied about the contents of his Laundromat to insurers. He also admitted that he persuaded his cousin, Strager, to lie in court. "And she lied at your request under oath?" Porter asked. "Because she saw financial gain in that," Skiba replied. "But she did it at your request, right?" Porter asked. "Barb is all about the money also," Skiba said. "Also, including you?" Porter asked. "Everyone is about money," Skiba said.

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