by Daniel Wakin
Scarnici was the only suspect identified, and he was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for the crime, chewing gum and smoking a cigarette on his way to the death chamber. Scarnici’s final words were reported to be, “All I want to say to those double-crossers up in Albany is that I’m a better man than they are.” The “double-crossers” were believed to be Geary and Oley; something, apparently, did not please Scarnici about their business arrangement.
With Scarnici out of the picture, new muscle was needed for the kidnapping job. Strewl made contact with Charles Harrigan, the leader of a gang in Hoboken, New Jersey. With the take from the bank robbery money, a henchman bought a used Durant Coupe from an Albany car dealer. The purchase was merely a way to obtain a legitimate license plate, which was then removed from the Durant and attached to the Pontiac sedan to which O’Connell was first transferred. After grabbing O’Connell, the gang took to the road and switched vehicles, pulling over to be met by a car-transporter truck driven by a confederate. O’Connell was stuffed into a secret compartment between the cab and a false back of the cargo section. Two members of the Hoboken crew climbed in and drove the truck to a rented apartment in Hoboken and stashed the kidnap victim there, where he remained handcuffed to the bed for three weeks. One man was assigned to bring his meals. Three others kept twenty-four-hour guard.
Harrigan periodically visited the apartment and had O’Connell sign several blank sheets of paper. Over the next three weeks, the gang delivered ten letters to an Albany post office box and the Beaver Clothing Company in Albany, making their demands to O’Connell’s family. The initial demand, sent to Edward O’Connell, a lawyer and John O’Connell’s uncle, was for $250,000 in exchange for the life of his nephew. Otherwise, the letter promised, his body would never be found. Two of the letters were typed, three were written by O’Connell himself, and five were handwritten by someone else above his signature.
The handwritten letters are still in the court file, folded pieces of notepaper stapled to the envelopes. Trial exhibit numbers are written on the notes. “Dan,” began one addressed to John’s uncle, Daniel O’Connell, handwritten in capital letters. “If this is made public it is the end. All negotitations [sic] must be secret or it is curtains for John. No letter is genuine unless it contains Johns [sic] signature. This will be ended fast if you get the sugar up and no kidding us.” The letter continued, “You are his God now and his only hope to live. So play fair and we will do likewise.” The kidnappers showed some psychological sophistication by trying to give O’Connell—the corrupt machine politician par excellence—a way to identify with them: “You have your racket and you can be thankful it gave you plenty, and we have ours.”
One letter told the O’Connells to insert, each day, a list of the names of Albany racketeers in the local paper. The kidnappers said they would choose a name from the list as an intermediary who would pay the ransom and pick up O’Connell. (As Frank S. Robinson in Machine Politics: a Study of Albany’s O’Connells points out, it speaks volumes that the O’Connells were so familiar with the Albany underworld that they could come up with the names.) The first list contained Oley’s name. The kidnappers did not respond. Then came a second list, again, with no response. They knew it was only a matter of time before Manny Strewl, the name they wanted to see, popped up. On the third day, it did. The kidnappers concocted a letter to Strewl, sent from New York City, assigning him the task of go-between. “You no doubt are acquainted with the O’Connell people,” it read. “Well you can be of great service to them. We have checked on you and decided to pick you as our go between if you are willing.” In response, Strewl contacted—or at least pretended to contact—the kidnappers a half-dozen times, mostly in New York City and once in the saloon on the ground floor of the very building where John O’Connell was being held. The whole plan in its intricacy presaged the complex machinations that were to come in the famous Bath Beach armed car robbery in front of the Rubel Ice Company.
The authorities suppressed information about the crime for days and when the news became public, they put out the word that the O’Connells were not cooperating with the authorities. In fact, the family and police were working closely together.
Investigators quickly identified three suspects: Strewl, Oley, and Geary. They did this by figuring out which members of the Albany underworld had disappeared from their usual haunts.
A week after the kidnapping, Strewl met with Daniel O’Connell in Washington Park in Albany to talk about the ransom. They eventually settled on a payment of $42,500. O’Connell gave the cash to Strewl on July 28. Raising the funds had not been a problem; the county had offered the family as much money as they needed. A family member declined, reportedly saying, “Thanks a lot, but the money is coming in so fast we don’t know what to do with it.”
Strewl gave everything but his fee of $2,500 to the gang. The next day, he picked up O’Connell, drove him back to Albany, and delivered him to his uncle Dan. For 23 days, Butch had been blindfolded and chained to a bed.
After O’Connell was released, Strewl was questioned, but played dumb. He could give no solid description of any kidnapper or provide license plate numbers. Butch O’Connell was home safe, but his kidnappers had made off with the ransom and remained at large. Strewl, however, was not off the hook. Police eventually arrested him and charged him with the kidnapping. He was tried in March 1934, defended by “Legs” Diamond’s lawyer. Experts declared that Strewl’s handwriting was in letters between the kidnappers and the O’Connells.
Strewl was convicted and sentenced to fifty years in prison. An appeals court overturned the conviction, but he pleaded guilty to blackmail and received a fifteen-year sentence. The O’Connell family did not want to stop there. They wanted the men who were really behind the crime. They issued a “wanted” poster with pictures of the Oley brothers (Francis Oley, John’s younger brother, was also involved), Geary, and the wives of the three men, and offered $15,000 in reward money for their capture.
In the complicated world of early twentieth-century big city machine politics, few thought the case was a straightforward trade of a powerful family’s scion for cash. Other motives were tossed around.
Some suggested that Butch was abducted to settle his father’s gambling debt.
Others theorized that the kidnapping was carried out to punish the O’Connells for failing to pay for a contract killing. The theory goes like this: “Legs” Diamond was angling to grab a share of the O’Connell family’s bootlegging business before the end of Prohibition. To put a stop to that, the O’Connells hired someone to kill Diamond, promising a share in their Hedrick brewery as compensation. Under this theory, attributed by Frank S. Robinson to “a confidential source close to the kidnappers,” the hired killer of Diamond never got their share of the brewery. The kidnapping was payback by that killer—who the author William Kennedy suggests may have been John Oley himself. If true, it casts a more sinister light on Oley. He would have been a murderer, not just a kidnapper and armed robber.
Kennedy mined this history for the second novel, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, in his Albany trilogy that began with Legs and ended with Ironweed, giving Oley and Geary a measure of immortality they never would have expected. In the middle work, written in 1978, the O’Connells became the McCalls; John O’Connell the kidnap victim became Charlie Boy McCall, a “soft, likeable kid gone to early bloat, but nevertheless the most powerful young man in town, son of the man who controlled all the gambling, all of it, in the city of Albany, and nephew of the two politicians who ran the city itself, all of it, and Albany County, all of that too: Irish-American potentates of the night and the day.” Strewl became Morrie Berman, “the son of a politically radical Jew, grandson of a superb old Sheridan Avenue tailor.”
The novel centers on a journalist named Martin Daugherty, a pivot between the Albany demimonde inhabited by Billy Phelan and the political class of the McCalls—who Kennedy describes as exercising a “stupendous omnipotence over both county a
nd city, which vibrated power strings even to the White House.” Phelan is a key figure who hovers on the edges of the kidnapping. As in real life, the Strewl character, Berman, chosen from a list of names in the newspaper, acts as a go-between. He receives a letter: “We got Charlie Boy and we want you to negotiate.” Berman mediates the release of Charlie Boy, and the next day, an Albany hoodlum named Honey Curry is shot dead by police in Newark and another, named Hubert Maloy, is wounded. Ransom money is found in their pockets. Curry and Maloy seem likely stand-ins for Geary and Oley. The next big caper of these two real-life characters, in Bath Beach, could also be the stuff of fiction.
CHAPTER 4.
No. 330: Baking Powder: “Their Difficulties Are Well Known”
AS THE LIFE WAS DRAINING AWAY from Bennie the Bum at 334 Riverside Drive following the Rubel robbery, and as his confederates were dealing with his death and disposal, a middle-aged couple just four doors down was living in splendor in one of the great homes on Riverside Drive—a place filled with oak wainscoting, parquet floors, a delicate parade of plaster nymphs, garlands, rosettes, and slender torches on the walls. The house at 330 Riverside Drive was also stuffed with jewels, silver plate, and art, a source of booty far closer and more accessible than an armored car near the Brooklyn waterfront.
The contents of the home, occupied by George and Lucretia Jephson, are known in precise detail because of an insurance appraisal that survives from 1916. Thanks to the appraisal, meticulous restoration by the current owner, and the retention of original furniture, 330 Riverside Drive exists as a time capsule, a glimpse into the lives and trappings of the New York City gentry almost exactly a century ago. Guests at 330 stepped through the front door into an oval entryway with interior glass doors bowed outward to a small reception room. For all the grandeur of the exterior and the knowledge of the wealth that dwelt inside, a visitor would have found the entry area surprisingly small and cozy, a casualty of having to design a grand mansion in a townhouse footprint. A fire crackled in the inglenook—a small recessed fireplace with two small benches extending from each side. Maybe the polar bear skin rug had been brought up from the vast basement, where it shared space with trunks, saws, and carpets. In the reception hall dotted with plush silk cushions and oriental vases, visitors left their umbrellas in a rack and deposited visiting cards in a tray.
The billiard room with its full-size oak table, Austrian beer steins, and large leather cushion chairs was to the left, off the entry area. It still has a manly brick fireplace and glassed-in book cabinets. Off to the right was the room of the butler, Henry, who while employed there in the middle 1910s slept on a single-sized hair mattress on an enameled bed. Also to the right was a servants’ sitting room, the pantry, and the kitchen with its thirty-four-piece aluminum cooking set, two coffee roasters, and rocking chair, where the cook rested after preparing the dinner and before climbing the stairs to her room on the fifth floor. (The benevolent visitor might have hoped that the Jephsons let the cook use the house’s tiny elevator, a floating birdcage of narrow metal bars, antique button controls, and a sliding metal grate door. George Jephson probably made sure that was the case. He was a decent and kind man.)
The first floor also housed a sterling silver storage chest with service for twelve, which would have been laid out on the massive mahogany table in the dining room upstairs for dinner parties.
Climbing up to the second floor on the Georgian-style staircase, dinner guests trod on maroon carpet from Axminster, the posh British purveyor dating back to the eighteenth century. Here they arrived at the main area for public display: a grand reception room filled with vases and figurines, with another inglenook fireplace.
They then passed through a doorway topped by downward curving transoms that evoked the flowing lines of the Art Nouveau movement that was peaking at the time of the building’s construction. Entering the drawing room, they would have been greeted by Lucretia and George. The room had a Baroque feel, all French empire curlicues and damask panels. Two Persian silk rugs seemed to float on the floor. Ivory carvings, Dresden figurines, and gilt candelabras adorned the tables and sat inside a lacquered bric-a-brac cabinet.
With dinner served, the guests passed through a door at the far end of the drawing room into the grand dining hall, squeezing past a hulking buffet table carved from Chilean mahogany and sporting floral motifs and carved grotesque faces as drawer pulls. Murals above the wood paneling stretched around the room and depicted woodland scenes (they are still there). The table, which had six extension leaves, marched down the rectangular room, surrounded by leather upholstered dining chairs made from the same Chilean mahogany. The Jephsons’ two maids laid out the gold-embossed Limoges dinner set. Finger bowls, burgundy glasses, cut-glass water tumblers, and covered crystal fruit salad servers occupied each place setting. George sliced the roast with a buck horn carving set and at the end of the meal would have passed around the sterling silver nut dishes. Henry went to the butler’s pantry off of the dining room to seek out any extra flatware or plate that was needed. The fresh-cut flowers from the tile-floored conservatory at the other end of the dining room added a dash of bright colors to the mahogany gloom.
Lucretia was not just an opera-lover—the family had a box at the old Metropolitan Opera house at 39th and Broadway, at a time when Toscanini was conducting there—but a singer herself. So after dinner, the guests probably glided back through the drawing room, went back out into the second-floor reception room, and passed into the music room on the other side, with its windows facing Riverside Drive. It held a Steinway Model C grand piano, two dozen chairs for an audience, and twenty-one volumes of music, along with 375 individual pieces. For guests with their own musical talents, there was a wood flute and a banjo. Lucretia may have plucked out a few arias from the shelf and sung in a fluty voice. The men likely politely withdrew to the library to smoke, and the women returned to the drawing room. Drawing from a cut-glass humidor, George and his male guests would light up and form groups to chat, to sit in the Flemish oak carved chairs, to examine a pair of Goerz field glasses or the bronze writing set sitting on an oak library table. Lucretia’s family, the Davises, despite their origins in the wilds of upstate New York, were a cultured clan, or had pretensions of being so. On the bookshelves were multivolume collections of Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Hugo, Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Poe, Longfellow, Tennyson, McCauley, and the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, who was entombed a mile to the north. Several hundred miscellaneous books also lined the shelves.
The guests saw the public rooms, but 330 Riverside extended upward three more floors. Lucretia’s bedroom (listed as Mrs. Jephson’s in the appraisal—with no reference to Mr. Jephson) was on the third floor. She slept in a four-poster canopy bed, part of a four-piece bedroom suite, and her belongings abounded in the chamber: items for the toilette, a gold miniature Louis XIV jewel case, crepe de chine and black poplin suits, silk lounging robes, opera glass bags, an ostrich feather collarette, and Japanese embroidered fans. The rear guest room on the third floor was filled with similar items of clothing and accessories. A fur wardrobe had scores of muffs, stoles, capes, coats and wraps with fur collars, and pillows.
The fourth floor had a half-dozen bedrooms and dressing rooms, which were filled with belongings and seem designed for storage, and a large cedar chest. The fifth floor had the maids’ rooms, a linen closet, storage rooms, a wardrobe room, and storage room for the servants.
Lucretia amassed a large collection of jewelry. The appraisal lists a mountain of pins, necklaces, pendants, rings, chains, and bracelets, all valued at $25,941.25, or nearly $570,000 in today’s dollars. The centerpiece? A diamond necklace with fifty-five stones, appraised at $9,000, worth about $200,000 today.
This opulence was made possible by a product that a supermarket shopper to this day will usually find in the baking section, often nestled amid the sugar and cake mixes and yeast. Its label has remained familiar for more than a century: a red shield, gen
tly curved at the bottom and the top, sitting on a bright orange background. On the shield are the words DAVIS, sagging down at each end; BAKING, running straight across; and POWDER, curving upward in a slight smile. The tiny letters “O.K.” sit in a circle. It’s a simple label for a simple product—a combination of bicarbonate of soda, acid salt, and cornstarch—a product that infuses baked goods with carbon dioxide so they rise, or leaven. On that, Robert Benson Davis built a fortune that provided the comfortable life for his daughter Lucretia and her husband. But it was a long and turbulent journey to arrive there.
Davis was born in 1843 in Pompey, New York, a town just outside of Syracuse. At sixteen he made the trek to New York City and went to work for a wholesale grocer named J. Monroe Taylor. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the eighteen-year-old Davis was back in the town of Manlius, near Pompey, to enlist for a three-year term with the Union Army on August 15, 1862. (Listing his occupation as farmer, he was certified in the enlistment papers boilerplate as “entirely sober” by the recruiting officer; the new recruit signed his papers “R. B. Davis,” and was called by those initials throughout his life.) Davis joined the 1st New York Mounted Rifles, assigned to Company L, a unit that drew on Syracuse-area men and was mustered in September. During the war, R. B. served in North Carolina and Virginia, where he took part in the battle at Spotsylvania Courthouse. He was discharged in Richmond, Virginia, on June 12, 1865, a twenty-two-year-old blue-eyed, five-foot-six-inch tall veteran with the rank of private. R. B.’s military records show he had been immediately promoted to corporal on enlistment, but something seems to have gone wrong because he was returned to private in May 1864. That didn’t prevent President Lincoln from giving Davis a commendation at the White House.