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The last time I wrote about true crime in this space I went back to 1931 and 1933 for stories of the spectacular gangsters of those days, like Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson. These two, along with many others, were actually both dead for years before I was old enough to be aware of them, but their memory lingered on. One way it was kept alive was by the chewing gum cards, enclosed with the gum, which carried illustrations of their exploits calculated to make them unforgettable to all normal boys who came across them. They did.
Floyd and the others were stick-up artists for the most part, which got them into innumerable gun battles with police and others trying to protect the property they wanted to steal. The more this happened, the more famous they got and the more their reputations grew. No wonder I still remember them so well.
But I didn’t know everything about old-time crime. I found this out the other day when I came across a story about Philadelphia in the 30’s and 40’s and the epidemic of poisonings there which completely escaped the notice of the country until finally exposed after most of its damage had been done. The body count run up by the ring members has been estimated at up to 1,000 people, completely overshadowing the work of the Floyds, Nelsons and Dillingers.
Since reading this story I’ve set out to repair the gap in my knowledge of criminality and am now prepared to synopsize the Philadelphia story. A full account would take a book, however, and in fact it has been given in a couple of books. For now, here is an outline of the facts in the case:
The ring had been going for several years without attracting any attention until in 1938 an ex-convict, George Myer, who needed money, met Herman Petrillo, a pasta salesman, who offered him $2,500 counterfeit cash or $600 actual money if he murdered a laborer named Ferdinando Alfonsi. Petrillo and Alfonsi’s wife wanted to split his life insurance between them.
Myer stalled Petrillo and went to the Secret Service with an offer to give up Petrillo and his counterfeiting operation. That interested them more than his murder scheme, which they doubted. While their agent was working on the case, though, Alfonsi died and Petrillo told the agent that his death was overdue since he’d been given enough arsenic to kill six men. The counterfeiting investigation was then placed on the back burner, with the murder case now taking precedence.
An autopsy confirmed the presence of arsenic and Petrillo and Alfonsi’s wife were arrested for murder. When the story broke in the newspapers, it led to an inflow of letters to the police revealing details of similar cases involving Petrillo or his cousin Paul Petrillo, a tailor. The police and the Philadelphia district attorney realized that to date they had only seen the tip of the iceberg. There was a whole network of poisoners, insurance agents and clients operating to shorten lives in the city of brotherly love.
The next case to surface was triggered by one Johnny Cacopardo, serving thirty years in New York for killingg his fiancée. He was Paul Petrillo’s nephew. He now became a witness before the Philadelphia grand jury and accused his uncle of being the ringleader of the poisoners and of trying to get him to join them. He also implicated two women, Carina Favato, who had poisoned her common-law husband Charles Ingrao and his son, Philip, and Stella Alfonsi, the widow of Ferdinand Alfonsi, whose death had triggered the investigation. The grand jury indicted the women and their principal, Herman Petrillo.
Paul Petrillo was released on a habeas corpus application but his cousin Herman went to trial on March 14, 1939. He was charged with the deaths of Alfonsi, the Ingraos, father and son, and a man named Caruso, whom he drowned. The poisoning deaths were not hard to prove, since the bodies were heavily impregnated with arsenic, which does not decompose. The district attorney in charge, Vincent McDevitt, made sure that the mistakes of previous arsenic cases were not repeated in this one, i.e., experts testified as to how much arsenic made a lethal dose, and evidence was carefully preserved from contamination. On March 12th Herman was convicted of first degree murder and a death sentence was recommended. He broke away from the defense table at this and attempted to strangle the jury foreman.
After this the dam broke. There was a total of twenty-five trials, with twenty-two convictions and three acquittals. Many of the prisoners entered pleas and testified to their knowledge of the operation. Even the two leaders, Herman and Paul Petrillo, both under death sentences, provided information, but it wasn’t enough to get them a commutation. The death sentences were carried out on both of them. Two women got life sentences and served them. So did Herman Bolber, a psychologist who made himself spiritual advisor to many of the women clients who were unhappy with their husbands, supplying them sometimes with arsenic to improve their love lives without telling them it was a poison. If the husband then died, the women were in Bolber’s power, as they were when they got illegal abortions by doctors he recommended. Bolber was also able to coerce women with threats of his psychic powers and access to the supernatural.
Today the Petrillos and their accomplices would be known as serial killers. They were con men, of course, preying mostly on poor Italian immigrants not familiar with America and inclined to distrust the police and government in general, making them easy pickings for smooth-talking sharpies. The Petrillos were a lot more than this, though. They weren’t just jolly grifters of the kind shown in movies. Their business was murder. That was how they made their money, not just by swindling suckers with their naughty but amusing tricks. These people had to kill to make their scores. Insurance companies didn’t pay off on faked deaths -- there had to be real ones. The Petrillos provided the deaths. How many they were responsible for no one can say. There were many insurance deaths in their community and not all could be impeached, i.e., proved deliberate. The estimates of these have run very high, even up to a thousand. No one will ever know. | |