Mafia Cop Killers in Akron Read online

  Published by The History Press

  Charleston, SC

  www.historypress.net

  Copyright © 2017 by Mark J. Price

  All rights reserved

  First published 2017

  e-book edition 2017

  ISBN 978.1.43966.382.0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948519

  print edition ISBN 978.1.46713.784.3

  Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Dedicated to Guy, Edward, Joseph, Gethin and George.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  The City of Opportunity

  Night Watch

  Another Ambush

  King of the Underworld

  Officer Down

  Hunt for the Gang

  Judgment Days

  The Long Arm of the Law

  A Kingpin Topples

  The Gang’s All Here

  Death House

  Echo of Gunfire

  Epilogue

  Appendix: Never Forget

  Sources

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My name is on the cover, but I didn’t do this alone. Many, many people helped in the creation of this book in ways both large and small. When the research felt overwhelming and the writing seemed insurmountable, I marched forward with the assistance and encouragement of others. I will forever be grateful for the expertise and guidance I received from close friends and total strangers. Thank you to all!

  First, I must acknowledge the tireless work of Akron–Summit County Public Library’s Special Collections Division. Recently retired manager Judy James; her successor, Mary Plazo; and librarians Iris Bolar, Cheri Goldner, Jane Gramlich, Rebecca Larson-Troyer, Barb Leden and alumnus Michael Elliott are a friendly team of history detectives who are unparalleled at digging into the past and gathering facts. No matter how many inane, trivial questions I posed, they always provided service with a smile.

  Similarly, the intelligent, genial staff at the University of Akron’s Archival Services—Head Archivist S. Victor Fleischer, John Ball, Mark Bloom and the late, great Craig Holbert—and Cleveland Public Library assistants April Lancaster and Doug Westerbeke rescued me again and again. I appreciate their kindness.

  In the search for public records from a century ago, I received invaluable aid from Sandra Kurt, Summit County clerk of courts; Scott Feeney, chief of staff for the clerk of courts; Daniel Brand, office manager for the clerk of courts; Gary Guenther, chief investigator for the Summit County Medical Examiner’s Office; and Kognia Woodall, deputy clerk at Summit County Probate Court. Likewise, Lily Birkhimer, digital projects coordinator at the Ohio History Connection, helped me track down some amazing photographs of Ohio Penitentiary convicts from a century ago.

  In the quest for understanding, I benefited greatly from the shared wisdom of Detective James Conley, Sergeant Tom Dye, Officer Robert Patrick, Officer Jeff Ross, Lieutenant Jim Buie and the late Captain John T. Cunningham. I truly appreciate the counsel of local historians David Lieberth, Leianne Neff Heppner and Dr. George W. Knepper. They are a blessing to the community.

  I’m extremely fortunate to have a trusted network of relatives and friends who never cease to provide a wealth of inspiration and knowledge: Al and Bootsie Bollas, Jon and Maria Bollas, Nick and Lindsey Bollas, Joe and Kelley Cali, David de la Fuente, Joe Del Medico, Mark and Diane Ferenchik, Jeff Gallatin, Tony Gapinski, Debby Stock Kiefer, Joe Kiefer, Steve Neff, Nick Owens, Rosie and Gene Owens, Sean Owens, Tim and Sharon Ricks and Glenn Stephenson.

  Special thanks to Drina Beeman, Dave Bersnak, Reverend Bob Denton, Fred Endres, Craig Erskine, Kathy Fraze, Bernie Gnap, Steve Hammond, Joe Harper, Phyllis Heischuber, Robert Herceg, Bruce Larrick, Pat Marks, John Miller, Kevin Murphy, Guerrino Rich, Dan Rinaldo, Jim Skeese, Mary Jane Stone, Ron Syroid, David Weyrick, Larry Zvara and Jim Zwisler.

  I am forever indebted to Bob DeMay, photo editor at the Akron Beacon Journal, for sorting and scanning most of the images that you see in this book, and to Kim Barth, director of photography at the Beacon Journal, for granting permission to publish many rare pictures from the newspaper archives. I am also in awe of chief librarian Norma Hill, who has a knack for finding articles and photos when I’m just about to give up. And to all my hardworking colleagues on the copy desk, I say, “Is it deadline yet?”

  I’d definitely like to thank Krista Slavicek, former acquisitions editor at The History Press, who approached me about writing another local history book after the success of Lost Akron, and Candice Lawrence, acquisitions editor, who enthusiastically took over the project. I’d also like to thank Ryan Finn, The History Press copy editor who combed these pages for typos and grammar—and who quickly discovered my admittedly limited knowledge of the Chicago Manual of Style—as well as Victoria Boneberg, the marketing specialist who provided assistance with sales and outreach.

  Where would I be today without my parents? My late father, Joel Edwin Price, was a gifted writer and poet, and I know he’d be thrilled to see his comic book–loving son earn a respectable living as a professional journalist and author. My wonderful mother, Angela Bollas Price, the first member of our family to edit a newspaper, remains a faithful supporter, a trusted adviser and a whiz at 1950s music trivia. She taught me how to read and write and how to tell right from wrong. Thanks, Mom! I love you.

  Finally, I want to thank my beautiful, cheerful, helpful and thoughtful wife, Susan Gapinski Price, an award-winning editor, talented writer and incredible person. She is my soul mate, best friend, copy editor, dining partner, movie co-viewer, concertgoer, vacation planner, puppy walker, package opener and personal tech. She saves me every day—and I can’t thank her enough for making my life a joy. I love you so much, Susie! As Aerosmith and I sang on our wedding day: “Every moment spent with you is a moment I treasure. I don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t want to fall asleep. ’Cause I’d miss you, babe. And I don’t want to miss a thing.”

  INTRODUCTION

  How did I not know the story? I’ve lived in the Akron-Canton area for most of my life, the fourth generation on both sides of my family to reside in Summit County. Countless tales were handed down to me, but not this one. Maybe my great-grandparents didn’t want to remember it.

  For nearly twenty years, I have written “This Place, This Time,” a weekly column about local history in the Akron Beacon Journal. During the column’s formative years, I stumbled across a reference to the Furnace Street gang and its deadly war against Akron police in the early twentieth century. It was one of the most shocking chapters in the city’s esteemed and occasionally lurid history, and I had never even heard of it.

  Each day, thousands of vehicles zoom past the eternal flame at the Akron Police Memorial in front of the Harold K. Stubbs Justice Center on South High Street in downtown Akron. I’ve glanced at it hundreds of times—perhaps more—because the monument is only a few blocks north of my office. I didn’t know that so many of the etched names on the marble slab belonged to men who were killed in a fifteen-month span.

  Black-and-white pages blurred together when I sat at the Akron library’s microfilm machine to examine vintage newspaper articles about the infamous series of crimes. The low hum of the machine served as wh
ite noise as I read the stories in rapt attention, occasionally taking notes on a legal pad or printing out copies. After months of dimly lit editions flashed past my retinas, I grudgingly pushed the rewind button and returned the microfilm boxes back to their shelf.

  I couldn’t possibly write a history column about this! The plot was too complex and the subject too important to be condensed into a single article for “This Place, This Time.” So, I gathered my notes, placed them in a box and hid them away for another time. Before I knew it, a decade had passed.

  A mental calendar began flipping its pages. A few years ago, I realized that December 2017 would mark the 100th anniversary of the Furnace Street gang’s reign of terror. When The History Press approached me about writing a follow-up to my 2015 book Lost Akron, it dawned on me what the topic should be. I couldn’t be the only native son who didn’t know about the 1917–19 gangland war. I dusted off the old notes and began new research, compelled to tell the story to a new generation.

  Sadly, this true-crime tale is timelier than ever. With more than sixty officers killed in the line of duty last year in the United States and hundreds of police-related shootings stirring protest and controversy, it’s impossible to regard the tragic events of one hundred years ago as merely a peculiarity from yesteryear.

  A century isn’t nearly as long as it seems. When I thumbed through vintage Akron city directories to see who lived and worked on Furnace Street during that tumultuous era, a dozen familiar surnames jumped off the pages. I attended Akron’s North High School in the late 1970s and early 1980s with students who shared those last names. These were good kids from good families. Did their ancestors claw their way out of that tough environment to find a better life? As the great-grandson of a bootlegger and reputed mobster, I know how much can change over a few generations. My cousin is a police detective.

  Although I moved away from North Hill years ago, it still feels like home to me. The Akron neighborhood, which rises up from North Howard Street like some modern-day Camelot, stands directly across the Little Cuyahoga Valley from Furnace Street. For generations, it was nicknamed “Little Italy,” a tribute to the immigrants who lived there.

  Life was a green, white and red tapestry of Italian restaurants, specialty markets, businesses, social halls, private clubs, spaghetti dinners, bake sales and solemn rites at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church. Fortunately for Akron, vestiges remain from that golden age, including DeVitis Italian Market, Dontino’s Fine Italian Cuisine, Unione Abruzzese, the Italian Center, Emidio’s Pizza, Carovillese Lodge & Club, Crest Bakery and Rasicci’s Pizza.

  That is the community that I grew up loving. That is the community that the Furnace Street gang could not destroy.

  THE CITY OF OPPORTUNITY

  The first thing that visitors noticed about Akron was the smell. A thick, pungent cloud of sulfur hung low over the Ohio city, an acrid fog that made nostrils flare and eyes sting. It was a gray, grimy town with billowing smoke, drifting soot and lingering haze. Yet people couldn’t wait to go there.

  In the early twentieth century, Akron was a boomtown where jobs were plentiful, opportunities were bountiful and fortunes were attainable. Newcomers arrived every day to claim their stake.

  Thanks to the surging popularity of automobiles, Akron tire makers Firestone, General, Goodrich, Goodyear, Miller and dozens of other rubber companies were noisy, bustling operations that operated twenty-four hours a day but still couldn’t meet demand. They needed to expand factories, boost capacity and add products, and to get it all done, they needed to hire more workers—and quickly.

  Akron companies took out classified ads in newspapers across the nation, practically begging for help:

  Wanted at once: 100 intelligent and able-bodied men. Apply to the B.F. Goodrich Co., Akron, Ohio.

  Wanted: Good strong, reliable men for factory work. Steady employment, good wages. Write or apply to Employment Office, Firestone Tire & Rubber Co., Akron, Ohio.

  Wanted: Unskilled men for production work. Ages 18 to 45. Weight 140 pounds or more in good physical condition. Good living wage paid while learning. Steady work assured. Apply in person or communicate with Factory Employment Office, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Akron, Ohio.

  Newcomers to the “City of Opportunity” pose for a souvenir portrait in the early 1900s at Arcade Studio on South Howard Street. The backdrop resembles the Akron Limited train. Author’s collection.

  Out-of-state laborers and foreign immigrants flocked to Akron, quickly landed factory jobs and wrote home to notify their friends and relatives that the Rubber City was still hiring. The Akron Chamber of Commerce proudly hailed the community as the “City of Opportunity,” a promotional slogan that was plastered on a giant billboard that welcomed railroad passengers at Union Depot.

  Founded in 1825 as a village on the Ohio & Erie Canal, Akron was not quite a century old. Its early industries included clay products, farming equipment and breakfast cereal before Dr. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich of New York moved to Akron in about 1870 to open the first rubber company west of the Alleghenies. No one in the village of ten thousand could predict that pliable rubber would cement the future. When F.A. Seiberling and his brother C.W. Seiberling co-founded Goodyear in 1898 and Harvey Firestone established Firestone in 1900, Akron’s reputation as the “Rubber Capital of the World” was secure.

  The sulfur-infused stench of smoking factories was hailed as “the smell of jobs.” In less than a decade, the old canal town had transformed into a major industrial city. Its rubber factories expanded from 22,000 workers in 1910 to more than 70,000 in 1920. At the same time, Akron’s population swelled from a svelte 69,067 to a stout 208,435, making it the fastest-growing city in the United States.

  Frankly, there was no place to put all those people. Contractors slapped together houses as quickly as possible. Families rented out basements to strangers. Shanties sprouted on the outskirts of Akron. Rooming houses offered beds in shifts, forcing three rubber workers to take eight-hour turns.

  Workers skipped town if they couldn’t find decent places to live. Goodyear and Firestone aimed to resolve the problem by building affordable homes for workers and their families in the new residential developments of Goodyear Heights (1913) and Firestone Park (1916).

  Longtime residents were pleased to see their city’s prosperity in the early twentieth century, but many were alarmed by the rampant growth, which put a strain on housing, sanitation, utilities and infrastructure. As Akron historian Karl H. Grismer (1896–1952) noted, the seismic change was not entirely welcome:

  Most displeasing of all were the crowds which now surged madly through the city. Never before had Akron seen so many people. Like a rampaging colony of ants, they filled the streets and sidewalks and choked the streetcars, theatres and restaurants—even in churches. Everywhere there were crowds—pushing, milling crowds, often fighting crowds. Almost every day, it seemed, the crowds became larger.

  Akron’s flag flies proudly in this Arcade Studio portrait from 1912. The city’s population grew from 69,067 in 1910 to 208,435 in 1920 as laborers sought jobs at rubber factories. Author’s collection.

  As strangers flooded the city, Akronites were bewildered to hear a cacophony of foreign languages and unfamiliar accents, perhaps forgetting that it was only a few decades earlier when nearly one-third of the city’s population spoke fluent German. The town was not immune to xenophobia, and foreigners were often viewed with distrust and disrespect. By 1915, as the Great War raged in Europe, Akron was home to an estimated 4,500 Serbians, 4,000 Hungarians, 3,500 Italians, 3,000 Romanians, 2,000 Slovaks, 1,500 Austrians, 200 Armenians and thousands more from miscellaneous ethnicities—truly a melting pot.

  The Akron YMCA held Americanization classes at night to help the newcomers assimilate but found it challenging to weld such disparate groups into one nationality. Many did not speak English or understand local customs. Urging Americans to try to better understand foreigners, immigration expert Edward A. Steiner, a prof
essor at Grinnell College in Iowa, praised the YMCA’s efforts in a 1916 lecture at the First Methodist Church in Akron:

  We get the pick of the men from foreign lands. They must pass physical examinations before they can buy a ticket. At Ellis Island, they must undergo still more stringent tests, more searching than we would have to face for life insurance. The men are fine specimens. They come to us abounding in health and youth and vitality and energy. How do we treat them? We give them the hardest, the most dangerous, the dirtiest work to do. They see the saloon and the poolroom, the women of the street, the unscrupulous employment agencies. They often miss the real America.

  There was no test for malevolent intentions, though. Besides attracting hardworking laborers, Akron also was the “City of Opportunity” for criminals, connivers and crooked characters. Young factory workers, new to town, had money to spend—and there was no shortage of ways to spend it. Gambling parlors, billiard halls, unlicensed saloons and houses of ill fame lurked in shady corners of town.

  Criminal arrests nearly doubled in Akron from roughly 5,900 in 1915 to about 10,600 in 1916. Safety Director Charles R. Morgan urged the public to help the police department as much as possible, saying the seventy officers on the force were woefully overworked, and it was the civic duty of all citizens to look out for robbers, thieves, burglars, pickpockets and other riffraff. “I wish every resident of Akron would look upon himself as a special officer and report any unlawful acts which come to his attention,” Morgan said. “It isn’t necessary for a man to be a regular policeman or even a deputy in order to report misdemeanors and assist in bringing criminals to justice.” Only then would the crime wave ebb, Morgan maintained.

  Detective Harry Welch, a police veteran of twenty years, was convinced that Akron’s fine, upstanding residents weren’t suddenly turning criminal. More than likely, it was the newcomers who were responsible for most of the recent problems, he said. “I have watched the town grow, and have studied its criminal element,” he said. “Akron entertains more degenerate transients than any other city in northern Ohio, not excepting Cleveland. It’s the town that’s growing, not the criminal element.”