Mafia Cop Killers in Akron Page 4

  More than a dozen members belonged to Borgia’s crew, but he trusted some more than others. There was Lorenzo Biondo, nineteen, alias James Palmieri, alias Jimmy the Bulldog, a square-jawed bruiser and two-fisted enforcer who always did what the boss ordered as long as the money kept rolling in; Pasquale Biondo, twenty-one, alias Bolo Mazza, alias Patsy Brando, a petulant hooligan, slight of build, with receding hair, a unibrow and wispy mustache and who, despite the surname, angrily insisted he wasn’t related to Lorenzo; Paul Chiavaro, twenty-four, alias Paulo Chivoro, a nebbish sadist who used dum-dum bullets to inflict more damage and coated them with oil of garlic to make the flesh blister; and Anthony Manfriedo, twenty-one, alias Tony Monfredo, a hard-luck underling who refused to kill a friend despite Borgia’s orders, so gang members shot him through the hand, stabbed him in the stomach, robbed him of forty dollars and threw him over a cliff into the Gorge—only for him to crawl out, beg for forgiveness and rejoin the group.

  Last but not least was the runt of the litter, Frank Mazzano, eighteen, alias Joe Pelo, alias Nicol Matolli, a five-foot-five thug who was as vicious as he was vain. The Sicilian arrived at Ellis Island in 1914, lived for a year in New York and then settled in Akron about 1915. An elevator operator at Goodrich, Mazzano quit his blue-collar job after getting a haircut from Borgia, who persuaded the teen to come work for him for ten dollars a week. Rosario had an impressionable protégé who could be groomed into a right-hand man.

  With exaggerated features, Mazzano’s face looked like it was sculpted from clay. He had large brown eyes, bushy eyebrows, puffy lips and a jet-black pompadour that he carefully combed. In a coat pocket, Mazzano carried a small mirror that he pulled out frequently to survey his looks and groom as needed. Sullen one moment and cracking jokes the next, Mazzano was a typical, rebellious, girl-crazy teenager who just happened to have psychopathic tendencies.

  With Mazzano in his thrall, Borgia sent the kid to Mansfield in April 1917 to stalk Carlo Bocaro, age twenty-four, a rival gangster and white slaver from Calabria. Borgia paid for Mazzano’s train fare and gave him money to buy a gun. “Rosario told me to kill him,” Mazzano explained later. “He knew him. They came from the same town in the old country. Rosario said he was a bad man and to shoot him.”

  Shortly before midnight on April 14, Mazzano ambushed Bocaro at Sixth and Diamond Streets in Mansfield, shooting him twice in the head and twice in the legs. Unbelievably, Bocaro survived the attack, and Mazzano later joked that he must be a terrible shot. Borgia sent hit man Frank Valona to finish the job, and Bocaro died in a fusillade of bullets on November 15, suffering three more gunshot wounds at close range. Valona was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Mazzano pleaded guilty to assault and battery and was freed on bond after “out-of-town Italians” fronted the necessary $500.

  Patrolmen Ed Costigan, Will McDonnell and other Akron officers knew that Borgia was up to no good, so they made life difficult for him. Vice raids and frequent harassment put a dent in the kingpin’s business. Because Borgia had once been fined $100 for carrying a concealed weapon, Costigan made it a habit of frisking him whenever he saw him.

  “The Borgia gang didn’t like Costigan and me,” McDonnell recalled. “Every chance we’d get, we would search them and come up with a knife or a gun. Then they’d be fined. It became pretty annoying to them.…Then one morning we noticed three strangers walking up and down the street, giving Costigan and me the eye. They made three trips up and down. We didn’t think too much about it at the time.”

  Borgia greeted officers with feigned affection when he saw them, but deep inside he seethed with anger. “I hate them! I hate them!” he told his gang, a fixation that may have begun with his uncle. Borgia was particularly obsessed with Costigan, the “Red Policeman.”

  In late 1917, he hatched a plot to teach the meddling cops a lesson by systematically ambushing them on the streets and putting a bounty on their heads. If necessary, the gang could stage holdups and attack the cops who responded to the calls. Patrolman Norris was the first to die. Costigan and Joseph Hunt were next.

  In his usual threatening manner, Borgia ordered three of his men to take care of Costigan—or else. He handed guns to Pasquale and Lorenzo Biondo, pointed to the officers on Furnace Street and told Anthony Manfriedo to serve as lookout on January 10, 1918. “Rosario told me I would be paid $150 for killing ‘Red.’ This was the same night, a half-hour before the murder,” Pasquale Biondo later testified. Borgia said he was tired of being searched and wanted Costigan dead. Then Borgia gave the Biondo men an ultimatum: “You kill him or I’ll kill you.”

  The men quietly followed Costigan and Hunt up the High Street hill while Manfriedo stood watch in the gathering darkness. Blam blam blam blam blam!

  Pasquale blasted Costigan, while Lorenzo gunned down Hunt. The gangsters ran back toward Furnace Street, dodging gunfire from the mortally wounded Hunt, and hid at an undisclosed location for several days as police interrogated foreigners across the city.

  After reading about the slayings in the newspaper, Borgia secretly arranged to meet the killers in Frank Mazzano’s cellar on Cross Street. “You did good work,” he told them. Taking out a wad of cash, he gave $100 apiece to the Biondos and $50 to Manfriedo. Pasquale didn’t know until later that he was shorted $50 of the promised $150. “I didn’t count the money then, but I counted it after I left the house,” he said.

  Summit County commissioners offered $3,000 for information leading to the arrest of the murderers whose brazen crimes had made national headlines. It was a tense, frightening time to live in Akron. Killers were on the loose, and no one knew when they might strike again.

  When officers canvassed Furnace Street and Howard Street and quizzed Borgia about the shooting of Costigan and Hunt, he denied any knowledge. “I was miles away,” he said. “They were always picking on me. Now you start. Why don’t you lay off? I don’t know a thing about it.”

  OFFICER DOWN

  At the request of Akron police, Italian American private detective George Martino began snooping around Furnace Street for any potential leads in the slayings of the three patrolmen. Martino had plenty of dealings with unsavory characters as the former owner of a Case Avenue saloon. He knew how to talk the talk and walk the walk. Plus, he was morally ambiguous.

  He once was sentenced to a month in the county jail for contempt of court after shielding the identity of a larceny suspect. Another time, he was named as a suspect in a $100 shortage from the Italian Foreign Exchange Bank, where he served as secretary, but the case was settled out of court. He also was implicated in a Cleveland scheme to pocket $100 in bond money that was intended for a fugitive.

  Word soon got back to the Furnace Street gang that an outsider was asking questions in the neighborhood. If Martino kept sticking his nose in other people’s business, he just might lose it.

  The private investigator caught wind in early March 1918 that Rosario Borgia’s boys might try to bump him off. His pulse quickened one evening when he realized that some tough-looking hoodlums were following him in downtown Akron. As Martino later explained:

  I had started east on Mill Street and the gang, starting from the Hotel Buchtel, trailed me. When I reached Broadway, I speeded up and instead of going over the viaduct, I dodged under and hid myself near the Pennsylvania freight house. I had my gun and was in a position where I could have dropped them one at a time. Evidently, the bunch thought I had crossed the viaduct, because they passed overhead and turned north on Prospect Street.

  Martino escaped that night, but others wouldn’t be as lucky. Two months after assassinating the cops on High Street and one week after giving Martino a scare, Borgia was ready to kill again. This time his target was Sicilian businessman Giacomo Ripellino, age forty, better known as Frank Bellini, who owned a rival “soft-drink parlor” and cigar shop on North Howard Street. Bellini, whose distinguishing characteristic was a massive, sculpted black mustache, had met Borgia three years earlier and feude
d with him for nearly as long. Bellini was quiet, calm and polite; Borgia was loud, boisterous and emotional. Each accused the other of tipping off authorities to their illegal enterprises, causing vice raids that put a crimp in business.

  Although the men hadn’t been on speaking terms for a year, Borgia signed a $10,000 contract in March 1918 to buy a home at 1014 Canal Street that Bellini had operated as a “questionable resort.” Borgia invited Bellini to discuss a trade agreement on Monday, March 11, at the Furnace Street poolroom, purportedly to resolve their differences, but Bellini suspected that the afternoon meeting was a trap and declined to go. An aggravated Borgia sent Frank Mazzano to remind Bellini of the appointment, but the Sicilian again failed to show up.

  Giacamo Ripellino, better known as Frank Bellini, was the Akron nemesis of Rosario Borgia. Frank Bellini mug shots. From the Akron Beacon Journal.

  With each passing hour, Borgia grew angrier. He drank wine, cracked walnuts and cursed Bellini while waiting in the smoke-filled billiard hall with Mazzano, Paul Chiavaro and other associates, including Salvatore Bambolo, Calcedonio Ferraro and Carmelo Pezzino. Borgia retreated to the back room with a few henchmen for a private meeting that lasted more than a half hour. “Borgia stopped me when I attempted to enter, told me to keep outside and shut the door,” Pezzino later recalled.

  Outfoxed by his nemesis, Borgia gave up on Bellini around 11:30 p.m. “Let him be tonight,” he muttered. “We get him another time.” Bellini’s intuition was correct. If he had gone to the pool hall, he surely would have vanished like so many of Borgia’s other enemies.

  Borgia led his men on a night parade through downtown Akron. It was cloudy and mild but windy as they walked south on Main Street, turned east on Exchange Street and stopped at Washington Street (now Wolf Ledges Parkway), where Bambolo, Ferraro and Pezzino said good night and went home. Borgia, Mazzano and Chiavaro turned back around. All three had loaded revolvers and weren’t ready to call it a night.

  Walking shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk just before 1:00 a.m., the Italians spied a dark figure drawing closer under the streetlights. George Fink, a Goodrich worker, was walking home from a friend’s house when he ran into the intimidating group at the Erie Railroad tracks. The well-dressed men, wearing overcoats and fedoras, refused to make room on the sidewalk and then roughly jostled him when he tried to pass. Thinking he was about to be robbed, Fink shoved his way past the ruffians and ran.

  Patrolman Gethin Richards was walking the beat about a block away near Grant Street when an agitated Fink, an old acquaintance, stopped him to complain that three men had just tried to hold him up. “Who are they?” Richards demanded. Fink pointed to the men traveling west on Exchange and replied, “There they go.” Clutching a nightstick, the cop hurried off to pursue the Italians, while Fink tried to keep up.

  Richards, thirty-seven, a ten-year veteran of the force, was a tall, brawny cop who was well known and well liked in his hometown. A son of Welsh immigrants, he had lived his whole life in Akron, and like everyone else, he was taken aback by the city’s rapid growth. He quit his security job at the Werner publishing company in 1907 to become a police officer and made a run for Summit County sheriff in 1914 on the Progressive Party ticket. As he noted in campaign advertisements:

  I do not think those who know me will question, but if elected I could and would fill the office acceptably to the people. However, this section has grown rapidly and while I used to know practically all of our people, that is no longer true. To those I do not know and who do not know me, I want to say this: I am not a politician and if I am nominated and elected, there will be no politics connected with the office of sheriff of Summit County. This important office I shall regard as a public trust and its duties shall be executed as the law directs without favor or malice to friend or foe, and at the smallest possible expense to the people.

  Patrolman Gethin Richards, a lifetime resident of Akron, was a ten-year veteran who once ran for Summit County sheriff. From the Akron Beacon Journal.

  One of more than a dozen candidates, Richards managed only seventy-four votes in the primary—at least two thousand fewer ballots than Republican hopeful Jim Corey, who went on to win the general election. The campaign over, Richards settled back into his beat.

  Richards was an efficient, orderly lawman who didn’t put up with any shenanigans. When he caught Alfred Minns mouthing off to pedestrians, the patrolman boxed the young man’s ears and charged him with disorderly conduct. When Gus Shue ordered a thirty-five-cent meal at the Gridiron restaurant without a penny in his pocket, Richards carried him by the collar to police court. When James Porter tried to steal several coils of copper wire from a Bell Telephone truck, Richards caught him in the act and threw him in the slammer. When Fred Hayward refused to buzz off after being accused of loitering on Main Street, Richards dragged him away on the sidewalk.

  A family tragedy soon turned the patrolman’s orderly world upside down. His thirty-one-year-old wife, Frieda Richards, died unexpectedly in April 1916 after falling into a diabetic coma, leaving the stunned cop with two young daughters to raise. His German-born in-laws, Fred and Marie Raeder, lived in the Richards home at 600 Grant Street and looked after the girls—both pupils at Leggett Elementary School—while their father worked nights. The daughters were home asleep at 1:00 a.m. on March 12 when Richards prepared to arrest some bad guys.

  If Borgia, Mazzano and Chiavaro knew they were being followed, they didn’t show it. At High and Exchange, they ambled past German-American Music Hall, whose name recently had been shortened to Music Hall because of anti-German sentiment, and turned north on Main Street. Stealthily, Patrolman Richards cut the corner to head them off, racing north on Maiden Lane and west on Kaiser Alley, while his buddy Fink walked quickly along Exchange. Richards caught up to the three Italians in front of the John Gross hardware store at 323 South Main Street.

  “Hands up!” Richards ordered as the men wheeled to face him. Wielding his nightstick, the officer grabbed Borgia and began to search him for weapons. For a moment, Mazzano and Chiavaro stood frozen, unsure what to do, but the boss saw an opportunity and took it. As Richards patted down Borgia, the former pro wrestler reportedly grabbed the six-foot, two-hundred-pound cop’s arm and twisted it behind his back.

  “Shoot him!” Borgia shouted in Italian. “If he finds the guns on us, we will all go to the electric chair.”

  As Richards struggled to break free, Mazzano pulled a revolver and fired twice, missing both times and striking windows of a nearby storefront. “What’s the matter with you?” Borgia hissed. “Are you trying to shoot me?”

  Serving as lookout, Chiavaro yelled, “No one is looking.” Mazzano steadied the Colt .38 in both hands and shot the officer once in the stomach and twice in the chest. Richards stumbled a few feet and collapsed on the brick street. George Fink turned the corner just in time to see the flashes of gunfire and dived for cover in the doorway of Joseph Ivory’s foreign exchange bank. Lights blinked on in one dark apartment after another as the noisy barrage awakened neighbors. Blinds opened and curtains parted. A woman leaned out a window and screamed for help after seeing the officer writhing in the street.

  A 1948 police magazine on display at the Akron Police Museum depicts three gangsters fleeing after the 1918 shooting of Patrolman Gethin Richards. The falling hat became a key bit of evidence. Courtesy of Akron Police Museum.

  The Akron Police Department shows off its new Packard squad car in front of the Summit County Courthouse in late 1917. In the front seat are Captain Robert Guillet and Fred Work. In the back seat are Patrolmen Paul Kraus, A.O. Nelson and John Mueller. From the Akron Beacon Journal.

  As the three gangsters ran away—Borgia fled north while Mazzano and Chiavaro scattered west—they tossed their guns aside, and Mazzano’s green felt hat flew off his head. Fingerprint identification was still in its infancy in American justice, so the criminals’ only concerns were getting rid of the evidence and not getting apprehended.

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p; Fink scrambled over to Richards and grabbed the wounded officer’s revolver with a vague idea of chasing the gangsters. “For God’s sake, Fink, don’t leave me,” Richards pleaded. “I’m going to die.”

  Moments later, Officers Howard Pollock and Roy A. Barron screeched to a halt in the Ford squad car while investigating the sound of gunfire on Main Street. As the men loaded Richards into the car, he ordered, “Get me to the hospital as quick as you can. I’m going to die.”

  HUNT FOR THE GANG

  With officers converging on the scene, a desperate Frank Mazzano and Paul Chiavaro ran a zigzag pattern to escape: east on Exchange, north on High Street, east on Buchtel Avenue and south on Broadway. Patrolman Oscar Wunderly gave chase when he saw two shadowy figures dart toward the railroad tracks.

  If the gangsters had hoped to leap the rails and flee east toward the University of Akron, a lumbering freight train blocked their path. They had no choice but to run north.

  Stumbling in the dark, Mazzano and Chiavaro followed the tracks toward the City Ice & Coal Company off Center Street (known today at University Avenue). They soon discovered that they had more to worry about than Akron police. Detective Henry LeDoux and Patrolman Edgar Bush, officers for the Erie Railroad, had been chatting in a wooden shanty when they heard the Main Street gunfire and went outside to investigate.

  Several minutes later, LeDoux noticed two suspicious men approaching. One was wearing a hat, and the other was bareheaded. LeDoux calmly drew his pistol and ordered the strangers to stop. “Don’t shoot!” Mazzano cried out. “Please don’t shoot!”