Prescription: Murder! Volume 1: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd

by Alan Hynd

  When the salesman called, there was Mrs. Lorenzo, the faithless wife, and Little Herman, the stand-in husband, look-ing for all the world like what they weren’t, applying for a $10,000 policy with double indemnity for accidental death. And they had cash in hand to pay for the first quarterly premium.

  A Prudential doctor called the following day, found Her-man to be a sound actuarial risk, and in due time the policies arrived in the mail. Mrs. Lorenzo intercepted them. Doctor Bolber began to follow the real Lorenzo around, the better to spot some plausible way of striking up an acquaint-anceship with the man. He fell into conversation with the roofer in a bar one night. Thus he discovered that Lorenzo was mad for dirty French post cards. Doctor Bolber acquired a supply of the French art and gave the stuff to Little Herman. Late one afternoon Little Herman buttonholed Lorenzo when the marked man came down off a roof and sold him some cards.

  “Get a hold of me any time you got more of this stuff,” Lorenzo told Herman. Doctor Bolber, too cagey to be hasty, allowed a few months to elapse before giving Little Herman the nod to take care of Lorenzo. But finally Little Herman appeared on a roof that Lorenzo was repairing solo. He had a new batch of French post cards for the roofer.

  “Gee,” said Lorenzo, “these are pippins. How much?”

  The question was to remain unanswered. Little Herman, looking around to make sure nobody was observing him, gave the ac-tuarial risk a shove and in a twinkling Lorenzo was plunging eight stories to the street.

  Six months passed before Doctor Bolber summoned Little Herman again. “You ever go fishin’?” Bolber asked.

  No, Little Herman didn’t know anything about fishing.

  Bolber told him to bone up on the sport and to buy himself some tackle.

  “We’ve found a man by the name of Fierenza who got $5,000 in double indemnity already,” the faith healer said. “He fishes every Saturday afternoon in the Schuylkill River. Your cousin is going to make love to his wife.”

  One fine Saturday afternoon, when Fierenza was about to go out in a rented rowboat, who just happened along but Lit-tle Herman. Actor that he was, Little Herman, carrying bait and tackle and wearing hip boots and a battered hat bright with artificial flies, looked more like a fisherman than a real fisherman.

  “You goin’ out in that there boat alone?” Little Herman asked Fierenza.

  “Yeah,” said Fierenza. “How about me and you sharin’ the boat and we’ll split the expense,” suggested Little Herman. The diminutive fiend patted his hip pocket. “I got a bottle with me, too.”

  Out on the water, in a sheltered cover where nobody could see them, Little Herman asked Fierenza if he could swim.

  “No,” said Fierenza.

  “Not a stroke?”

  “Look,” said Fierenza, “if I went overboard I’d be drowned.”

  “Hey,” said Little Herman a few sips of booze later, pointing to something behind Fierenza. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “There. Behind you!” Fierenza turned and there was a shove, a scream and a splash.

  Little Herman, who could swim better than a lot of fish, dived off the other side of the boat. Then, good and wet, he climbed back in the boat again and rowed ashore. There he acted the role of a heart-broken friend.

  “It’s all my fault,” he said. “I should have saved him.”

  With three victims, Giacobbe, the dry-goods merchant, Lorenzo, the roofer, and Fierenza, the fisherman, disposed of within a year and a half, for an over-all take of $25,000, Doc-tor Bolber saw nothing ahead but a golden future. Many of the immigrant women who would be there clients had burdensome abusive husbands with whom they had been stuck with back in Italy. Since most were practicing Catholics, divorce was not an option. Thus Bolber and his two associates were selling a product that had a certain appeal. Similarly, most people in South Philadelphia knew better than to go to the police.

  “There’s no telling,” Bolber said to the Petrillo cousins while the three sat around the faith healer’s office over a jug of Chianti one night in the summer of 1933, “where a thing like this could end. Why, we could establish branches all over the country—like Household Finance.”

  Doctor Bolber, having his ear to the ground, had gotten a rumble about a most remarkable woman in North Philadelphia, a woman named Maria (or Carina) Favato who was known in her own bailiwick as the Witch. The Witch, who was a widow, was in the same profession as Doctor Bolber: faith healing, saltpeter and general mumbo jumbo.

  The Witch, who was a widow, was in the business of getting rid of unwanted husbands for wives. Not for insurance money, but just to get rid of the men. This impressed Bolber as a wanton waste of golden opportunity and that was why, on one hot summer night, he journeyed across town to converse with Mrs. Favato.

  One look at the Witch convinced Doctor Bolber why she had taken on that appellation. The woman, in her early forties, was strictly out of a bad dream: short, squat, with a hooked nose and a face that reminded Bolber of a batch of fresh dough with two currants for eyes. The Witch, it developed, had heard of Bolber and so, since the two immediately understood each other, they dispensed with the preliminaries and began to talk shop.

  What, Bolber inquired, did the Witch use to poison errant husbands?

  “Best stuff is arsenic,” said the Witch. “What you usin’?”

  “Conium.”

  “What that?”

  “It’s from the carrot family. It’s also known as hemlock. It’s what they used to poison Socrates with,” Bolber said.

  “Who?”

  “Socrates.”

  “Philadelphia man?” the Witch inquired.

  “Not exactly,” said Bolber.

  Doctor Bolber asked the Witch if she was married.

  “Had five husbands,” said the Witch. “Poisoned three.”

  “And did you collect insurance on the ones you poisoned?” Bolber inquired pleasantly.

  The Witch nodded. Now Bolber explained how simple it was to collect insur-ance on the husbands of other women. The Witch was fasci-nated and craved details. Bolber supplied them.

  “Jesus,” said the Witch. “Look all the money I coulda made if I’d thunk of that.”

  Bolber patted the Witch’s hand. “Never mind,” he assured her. “We’ll make up for lost time.”

  The Witch went to her card file. A hapless janitor named Dominic Petrino emerged from the file as a sound prospect. Petrino’s wife had been buying saltpeter from the Witch for some time without appreciable results. The faith healer explained to the Witch that Paul Petrillo, the wolfish tailor, would romance the janitor’s wife and condi-tion her for the plot. Then Little Herman would pose as the janitor for the benefit of the insurance people and when the real janitor was bumped off the Witch would be cut in on the take.

  “Good,” said the Witch. “While you doin’ that I be lookin’ for more husbands.”

  After Paul Petrillo had set things up in the Petrino home, Little Herman, the actor, hovered in the wings, ready to go on stage and essay one of his finest roles. One day when the real janitor was at work, Little Herman, dressed like a janitor, and smelling like one, sat around the Petrino flat with the faithless wife when a salesman for the Prudential Life Insurance Company called.

  Herman said he would like to take out a $10,000 policy with double indemnity. The salesman, although as fee happy as the average policy peddler, inquired how a janitor could keep up the payments on such a big policy.

  Doctor Bolber, the sly one, had prepared well in advance for that very question. He had fixed up a couple of fake bankbooks that made it appear that the janitor had $12,000 in sav-ings.

  “Me and my wife here turn over houses,” Little Herman explained, meaning that the couple dabbled in real estate. That made everything all right.

  It was two days later, when a doctor for the Prudential called to give the stand-in applicant a physical examination, that Little Herman had a few bad moments. This same doctor had examined Little Herman mo
re than a year before, when Little Herman had posed as the husband of Lorenzo, the doomed roofer.

  “Haven’t I seen you someplace before?” asked the doctor.

  “Never seen you in my life, Doc,” said Little Herman.

  “But I could swear that I’ve examined you for insurance before.”

  “You couldn’t of, Doc. I ain’t never taken no out insurance be-fore.” The doctor ascribed the whole thing to a case of mis-taken identity, examined Little Herman, found him a sound actuarial risk, and the policy was issued.

  A few months passed. Then Doctor Bolber gave the nod for the end of the real janitor. Petrino worked in a tenement house. The faith healer handed Little Herman a monkey wrench, instructed him to pose as an inspector for the gas company, sneak up behind Petrino when the janitor was at the top of a flight of steep stairs, and crown him with the wrench.

  “It’ll look,” Bolber explained, “like that janitor just fell down the stairs and fractured his skull.”

  One night, a couple of weeks later, Doctor Bolber again crossed the city to pay another visit to the Witch. He handed her five hundred dollars for her cut of the Petrino take. “Who else you got for us?” he asked.

  The Witch had a fishmonger named Luigi Primavera. It was the same evil story all over again, with Paul Petrillo romanc-ing the wife and Little Herman Petrillo standing in for the doomed man. But this time there was a new twist. Doctor Bolber, warming up to his work, decided to take a more personal hand in mat-ters. “I’m going to kill this man Primavera personally,” he in-formed the Petrillo cousins

  “How, Doc?” asked Little Herman. “I’m going to run over him with an automobile,” said the faith healer. So one rainy day, while Primavera was hawking fish on a lonely street in South Philly, Doctor Bolber, at the wheel of a car with a souped-up motor and fake license plates, waited until the victim left his wagon to knock on some doors. Then the doctor stepped on the gas, ran up on a sidewalk and sent poor Primavera and his fish flying.

  Late that night, the doctor sat in his office reading the early editions of the morning papers. The papers carried the story of the hit-and-runner who had killed the fishmonger. Some people living on the street where the fatality had occurred had told the cops that the driver of the car, whose description fitted that of Bolber, had apparently been deliberate in run-ning Primavera down.

  The faith healer sat in his office most of that night, drinking and thinking. Just as daylight was peeping through the blinds in his office he reached a momentous decision. Henceforth he would eschew accidental deaths in favor of natural ones. True, a natural death paid only half the insurance money that a double indemnity one did, but it was less likely to excite sus-picion.

  Next Doctor Bolber was visited by an inspiration that was to prove a bright milestone in the history of premeditated homicide. He decided that a canvas bag, filled with about twenty pounds of sand, would, if brought down properly on a man’s head, render the victim temporarily unconscious. Repeated ad-ditional blows would induce a cerebral hemorrhage and a sand bag would leave no outward traces of having been applied.

  Doctor Bolber’s sandbag technique proved just as success-ful as he predicted it would be. For three solid years, from 1934 to 1937, Paul and Little Herman Petrillo, working stealthily under the faith healer’s supervision, traveled through-out the Quaker City, respectively romancing wives and sand-bagging sleeping husbands. And by now, a new twist had been added. With the assistance of The Witch in North Philly, some of the recent widows were now being primped for re-marriage…with the intention of taking out new insurance policies on their new husbands and then arranging for their lucrative demise.

  The Witch proved to be a most valuable scout for the satanic doctor.

  By January of 1937, some five years after Mrs. Anthony Giacobbe had first appeared in Doctor Bolber’s crummy office asking for some saltpeter for her errant spouse, the faith healer had given the nod for an estimated fifty killings. By now Bolber’s faded-red brick home at the corner of Ninth Street and Moyamensing Avenue had taken on a new look by an expensive mid-town decorating outfit.

  The Petrillo boys were also doing splendidly at the bank and chasing around town in expensive automobiles. The Witch, who was a baseball fan devoted to the fortunes of the local Philadelphia Athletics, was to be seen regu-larly in a field box at Shibe Park, eating hot dogs by the half dozen, spilling mustard on expensive satin dresses, and invok-ing the wrath of the nether regions on the players of visiting clubs.

  Everybody was fat and rich. But were they happy? You’re damned right they were!

  So far as the Philadelphia Police Department went, Doctor Bolber might very well have still been sitting there in his office in South Philly for several decades beyond the Thirties, giving the lethal nod to the Petrillo boys. Only one cop in the entire department—a smart and honest dick by the name of Sam Ricardo—got a whiff of what was going on.

  Ricardo, like Doctor Bolber, was a fellow who kept an ear to the ground. Thus, in the early months of 1937, he heard the first faint rumbles of a murder-for-insurance ring at work. Ricardo didn’t hear any names, just that there were, and had been for some time, some not-so-brotherly goings on in the City of Brotherly Love.

  Detective Ricardo went to his superiors and asked to be as-signed to investigate the rumors he had heard. His superiors looked at Ricardo as if the man were not quite bright. So Ricardo was assigned to some pedestrian investigations while Doctor Bolber continued on his satanic way.

  It was in a jail house, of all places, where something de-veloped that was, in the final analysis, to trip up Doctor Bol-ber. There was a fellow named George Meyer, not a bad soul, who was doing a stretch in a workhouse for a minor offense. Meyer put his time in durance vile to good advantage by invent-ing a cheap cleaning fluid. So when he was about to get out of the can in the spring of 1937, he asked a fellow con if the con knew of anybody on the outside who might be able to finance the cleaning fluid so that George Meyer could get it on the market and make a legal living. Meyer also had an upholstery business.

  “Yeah,” said the fellow con. “Look up a guy by the name of Herman Petrillo. He’s got all kinds of dough.”

  Meyer went and met with Petrillo. Little Herman only half listened as George Meyer expounded the prospects for his cleaning fluid.

  “I ain’t inarrested in nothin’ like that,” said Little Herman. “But tell you what. You go out and dig up a guy we can get insurance on and knock off and I’ll cut you in on it.”

  George Meyer asked for more details. Little Herman, thinking he was safe talking to a recently released convict, supplied the details. Meyer, still playing it straight, said he’d think it over. Meyer, who wanted no part of a return to incarceration, went to the police where eventually he met with Detective Ricardo. Riccardo, seeing a winning hand when he was dealt one, moved Meyer to the office of the U.S. Secret Service, the federal agency that investigates counterfeiting, and offer them his assistance. Ricardo knew Petrillo was a counterfeiter and guessed the feds might be interested in what George Meyer had to say.

  They were.

  Three months earlier, a man named Ferdinando Alfonsi, 38, had died under mysterious circumstances. A bright up-and-coming assistant district attorney named Vincent McDevitt, who would later become the D.A., himself, had drawn the case from his boss, amidst rumors about various murder-for-profit cases in Philadelphia. But the investigation had gone nowhere. But now, acting on Meyer’s snitch, a Secret Service agent, known only as Agent Landvoight, working undercover under an alias, visited the District Attorney’s office and soon landed in the office of McDevitt.

  Landvoight told McDevitt that he had an informer, Meyer, who had told him of a group of men and women based in Philadelphia who ran a murder ring to collect insurance money. Involved in the ring was one Herman Petrillo. Landvoight was already familiar with Petrillo. He had tried for years to arrest him for counterfeiting, but every time the authorities served a warrant Petrillo outfoxed them.

/>   Meyer had told Landvoight that Petrillo had offered him $500 in legal tender and $2,500 in counterfeit bills, if Meyer could organize a hit on a man named Ferdinando Alfonsi. He then handed him an 18-inch piece of pipe.

  “Do it in his home,” Petrillo said. “Bash him with the pipe. Then carry him up the steps and throw him down. It’ll look like an accident. Got it?”

  Meyer had no intention of carrying out the crime, but played along hoping that Petrillo would offer money. Petrillo would not pony up a nickel up front. In the end, Meyer scored some cash by selling the information to the Secret Service.

  Understandably, Landvoight was more interested in the counterfeit bills than he was in any murder conspiracy. He offered to keep on paying Meyer if he would continue to play along with Petrillo’s scheme. The down and out businessman had little choice and reluctantly agreed.

  Agent Landvoight arranged for Stanley Phillips, a street-wise agent of the Secret Service, to work with Meyer. On August 1, 1938, Meyer and Phillips met with Herman Petrillo at a local diner. Petrillo was uncomfortable discussing the plans in public, so the three men went out to the street and sat in his car. Meyer introduced Phillips as Johnny Phillips, a friend of his that was fresh out of prison after serving time for murder.

  Herman Petrillo liked the pedigree. The conversation soon turned to Alfonsi. He suggested that they take him to the Jersey shore, drown him and make it look like an accident. Phillips was not interested in the murder plot but wanted to get his hands on some of Petrillo’s counterfeits. So he suggested that Petrillo give them some money to buy a car. They could use the car to run him over and leave his body in the road. Petrillo liked the idea, but suggested they steal a car, rather than buy one. There it remained for three weeks. Then the men met again at a diner on Thayer Street. Petrillo still did not want to give the men money to buy a car but offered to sell them some bogus currency.

  Petrillo pulled out a counterfeit five. Phillips was impressed with the engraving and agreed to buy $200 worth of the bogus bills. Petrillo said he needed two weeks to deliver.