Man with the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a Ne

by Daniel Wakin

  The arrests of Geary and Oley were for the O’Connell case, but New York detectives were circling the two men like hawks for the Rubel heist. They were intent on questioning them. But federal authorities resisted, and William F. X. Geoghan, the Brooklyn district attorney, intervened to push the FBI to allow his investigators to proceed. William Lilienthal and John Wilson, two of the armored car guards, were brought in, but could not identify either man.

  Meanwhile, the trial for the O’Connell kidnapping went ahead in United States District Court in Binghamton, New York, and ended in convictions on August 12, 1937. Found guilty were Charles Harrigan, the Hoboken gangster enlisted to help with the kidnapping; four members of his crew; Manny Strewl; and Geary and John Oley. Three of the Hoboken gangsters were sent to Alcatraz, and another hanged himself in jail.

  Oley and Geary were sentenced to seventy-seven years in prison. They and one of the convicted kidnappers, Harold Crowley, appealed, and were housed temporarily at the Onandaga County Penitentiary in Jamesville during the process. They did not stay in Jamesville for long.

  On November 16, the three men escaped, led by Geary, who later told prison authorities at Leavenworth that he simply couldn’t resist the temptation to run when the opportunity presented itself. As in the Rubel heist, Geary and Oley displayed a knack for planning and a flair for daring. Investigators later discovered that several bars in Oley’s cell had been dislodged and held in place by chewing gum. They found that knives and files had been smuggled into the cellblock, along with two revolvers—a .38 Colt Bankers Special and a .38 Iver Johnson—possibly by Geary’s wife. Geary, armed with the guns, walked out of his cell, crossed a corridor, and removed a bar that had also been cut from a cellblock anteroom. He opened a door, climbed a flight of stairs to another cell block, and hid behind a door.

  When John Corbett, a guard, approached on his rounds, Geary jumped out, pointed a gun at him, and ordered him to ring the “all’s well” bell. Geary hustled the guard to an office and ordered him to summon several other guards on duty, on the pretext that Oley was hanging himself. When they arrived, Geary marched the group to Oley’s and Crowley’s cells, forcing Corbett to open the doors. Geary snatched the keys from Corbett and relieved him of $35. The three prisoners tied up the guards with their neckties and belts, stuffed their mouths with mattress cotton, and put them in the cells the prisoners once occupied. When a guard named Nellie Hill stumbled upon the group, she too was grabbed and tied up.

  Out in the prison yard, the three men ambushed another guard, Edward Hayes. They hustled him out to his car, grabbed the car keys, and bound him up too. But the car wouldn’t start. They managed to get the vehicle running and drove five miles to Syracuse, with Hayes in the back seat and Geary next to him. At the prison, the guards struggled to free themselves; Hill managed to wriggle out of her bonds first. She quickly helped the others slip out of the ties and belts, and they called for help.

  The men drove to the center of Syracuse, where they abandoned Hayes and his car, next stopping a driver, Henry King, and at gunpoint forcing him to take them toward Manlius, the very town near Syracuse where R. B. Davis had enlisted in the Union Army in another century. The prisoners knew how the police might react, including setting up roadblocks, and had second thoughts about traveling the main route. So they instructed King to take a side road and return to Syracuse, to his mother’s house, where they ordered her to prepare them a meal. After they left, King told the police that the escapees had taken his overcoat and left one of theirs behind. The coat had belonged to John Corbett, the guard held in the jail break.

  The police quickly traced Geary, Oley, and Crowley to a rooming house on the edge of Syracuse’s downtown district. Their presence was revealed by a janitor, Ivan Whiteford, who was in the hallway of a vacant house looking at the place as a possible rental when the three escapees confronted him with guns. When they ordered him to help find them a room and food, he offered his own home. They agreed and the group motored to Whiteford’s rooming house. He went out to procure food and liquor, came back, and drank with his unexpected guests to ingratiate himself with them. At the first opportunity, he slipped out to summon the police. When officers moved in for the arrests, on November 17, Crowley and Oley surrendered, but Geary escaped by jumping twenty feet out of a bathroom window, injuring his leg. The police found two revolvers stashed under a bed at the rooming house.

  After their arrests, Oley and Crowley revealed that Geary had found a loose cell bar, removed it, and used chewing gum to hold it in place. They denied sawing the bar open, as it first seemed. “It was as easy as getting out of a paper bag,” Oley explained. “These local cops are lots smarter than G-men. As for Geary, he’s the smartest of all, but I imagine we’ll be seeing him soon at Alcatraz.”

  The escape was splashy enough to land the convicts on Gang Busters, an immensely popular radio program of the era that reenacted police case histories. “Special flash! All citizens are asked to cooperate with the police in the apprehension of one of the most dangerous criminals at large today,” the script read. “Percy Geary, 29, 5 feet 9½ inches tall, 134 pounds, chestnut hair, gray eyes. His two companions, Harold Crowley and John Oley, who escaped with him from Onondaga Penitentiary where they were serving terms for kidnapping, were captured today. But Geary escaped by jumping out of a window. He may be badly hurt, but should be approached with caution, as this man is desperate.”

  One of the listeners that evening was a parking lot attendant named Caspar Mirra, who worked near the rooming house where Oley and Crowley had been arrested. Shortly after the arrests, Mirra saw someone who looked like a bum sitting on a curb nearby. When the man said he had injured his foot tripping over a can, Mirra invited the unfortunate soul into a shack at the lot, where he warmed his hands in front of a stove in the corner.

  Mirra connected his visitor to the Gang Busters report and told a customer of the parking lot to call the police. When an officer, his gun drawn, entered the shack, Percy Geary gave up without resistance. He was too weak to fight. Mirra received $2,000 in reward money, and Whiteford, the janitor whose tip led to the two arrests, took in $4,000. A week later, Agnes Oley and Josephine Geary, the wives of the two felons, were hauled in for harboring fugitives. They did not go as meekly as Geary, battling with police in a hair-pulling, clawing brawl. In a footnote, Mirra went on to get a job as a messenger at the Syracuse Savings Bank, where he deposited his reward money.

  On January 26, 1938, John Oley and Percy Geary were convicted of the crime of escaping from the Onandaga jail. The jury deliberated for all of seventeen minutes before rendering their verdict. The defendants refused counsel and argued that they had been wrongly convicted in the O’Connell kidnapping, and so had a right to escape. The judge sentenced them to five additional years in prison.

  Seven months later, on July 11, 1938, Geary and Oley finally arrived at Alcatraz to begin their seventy-seven-year prison terms for the O’Connell kidnapping. Hyman Barshay, the Rubel case prosecutor, later said he believed the two men used proceeds from the armored car robbery to help pay for their defense in the kidnapping trial.

  Before his kidnappers went off to Alcatraz, Butch O’Connell, their victim, married Mary Fahey, the woman he had dated on the night of his kidnapping. Butch went on to serve as a figurehead leader of the Albany Democratic Committee, dying in 1954 at the age of forty-five.

  CHAPTER 16.

  No. 336: Rubber and Clay

  THE SEVEN BEAUTIES REACHED THEIR FULL height of respectability with the arrival of the Penfields. They joined the Canavans, of the excavation business; the Takamines, of the biotech industry; the Davises, of the food industry; and the Fabers, pencil manufacturers. For the Penfields, prosperity derived from bricks and the machines that made them, which in turn created the materials that helped cities and towns grow across America.

  After renting No. 336 in the years before World War I, the Penfields bought the townhouse around 1914. The family consisted of Raymond Penfield, his
wife Minnie Patterson Penfield, their sons Harold Cassanove and James Preston, and their daughter Julia. Raymond Penfield was born in Willoughby, Ohio, on May 31, 1860. His grandfather founded the American Clay Machinery Co., a business that made bricks, clay-handling equipment, and tractors. After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1885, Raymond Penfield went right to work for the company. The sudden death of his father in the early 1890s thrust Raymond into the presidency of American Clay before he turned thirty. He adopted an aggressive strategy, acquiring control of the rival National Clay Manufacturing and the Great Eastern Clay Manufacturing companies. But it may have been the wrong move. Both were placed in receivership by 1903. In 1914, American Clay merged with the English company Hatfield to form the Hatfield-Penfield Steel Company, which adapted machinery once used by American Clay to make brick kilns for the manufacture of shells and other munitions for the Allied armies during World War I. The partnership dissolved after the war and Penfield retired in 1928.

  While running American Clay, Penfield also served as president of two other companies: the American Equipment Company of Chicago, which he helped found, and more notably, starting in 1898, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. He was Goodyear’s second president, and presumably benefited from family connections: Frank A. Seiberling, who founded the tiremaker, was married to Penfield’s sister Gertrude.

  Penfield’s other mark on turn-of-the-century business history in America was the invention of a new mechanical system to handle bricks during their production. In 1918, with the end of his wartime munitions endeavor, Penfield set up the New York Brickhandling Corp. in 1918 to put the system to use, and ran the company for ten years. Penfield had some sort of crisis in this period because the Herald-Tribune, in its obituary, said he “suffered a nervous breakdown” soon after the war and never fully recovered. But the war was good for him economically.

  During their time on Riverside Drive, the Penfields’ twenty-room elevator-equipped home played host to parties, receptions, concerts, and a celebration of their silver wedding anniversary on May 27, 1910. The contralto Beatrice McCue, accompanied by the violinist Roland Meyer, gave a recital on a winter Friday afternoon in 1912. One of the most lavish events of all was the reception after a double wedding for Harold and Julia, herself a singer, on June 19, 1912, at St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church on West End Avenue and 86th Street.

  The wedding was the sort of grand affair that received prominent coverage in the newspapers. Both couples entered the church simultaneously and processed down separate aisles under arches of pink roses. Julia, who was marrying Aaron Bastedo, a fellow singer, wore a coronet of orange blossoms and a diamond necklace and held a bouquet of orchids and lilies of the valley. Her cousin, Irene Seiberling, was the maid of honor. Harold married Anna Bullwinkel, a Brooklyn girl.

  The 1930 census put the Penfield house’s value at $98,000. The family, who were attended to by their African American butler, Harry Campbell, also had a renter, a raincoat salesman named Rufus Hubbard, who paid $75 a month for lodging. Were the Penfields in financial need? Maybe they were acting altruistically. Hubbard was a World War I veteran.

  Penfield died of pneumonia in 1932, and seventy-five people gathered at No. 336 for his funeral. He was seventy-two and had been weakened from a fractured shoulder suffered in a fall as he headed down train steps in Rye, New York. Hymns filled the halls: “Face to Face,” “There is No Death,” “The Lord’s Prayer,” and “Lead, Kindly Light.” An old Wesleyan classmate, the Reverend Francis Upham, helped officiate. Penfield was buried in the village cemetery of Willoughby, Ohio, the town where he was born.

  The Penfield family story gives some insight into the changing fortunes of Riverside Drive, which never really lived up to its promise as a new Fifth Avenue. Within their first thirty-five years of life, our row of townhouses began showing decay. Tully’s establishment, two doors down from the Penfields, was a pretty clear sign. Just two blocks north on Riverside was another establishment dedicated to sin, and one that drew the crusading energies of Minnie Penfield, the matriarch of No. 336. Minnie joined her neighbors in fighting to close the establishment, which was grandly but incongruously named the Patrician and played host to weddings, dances, and private parties. A lawyer for the neighbors, John Sullivan, said the owners of the Patrician would hold any sort of event for money. “One can hear the blare of jazz music there every night,” he harrumphed at a hearing before the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals. “Taxicabs congregate about the place at all hours and men and women revelers stand and sit about on the steps and talk loudly until the very late hours. I would not go so far as to say there is drinking there, but the noise is very disconcerting to the residents of the neighborhood.” The board ordered the place shut. The fight between neighbors and noise-generating establishments is an age-old one in New York City.

  Indeed, the whole area of the Upper West Side, especially in the side streets between the grand avenues of West End, Broadway, Central Park West, and Riverside Drive, developed a seedier aspect after the initial development rush at the beginning of the twentieth century. Pigeon coops came to dot rooftops—the gang lord Owney Madden even had one on atop the majestic Belnord apartment house on 86th Street and Broadway. Away from the elegant residential avenues, street urchins plucked cigarette butts from the sidewalk and populated crap games. Speakeasies, gambling parlors, and bordellos sprouted in the neighborhood, mostly in side-street tenements. Shantytowns, many inhabited by World War I veterans, arose near the shores of the Hudson River during the Depression. Bars filled buckets with beer, called growlers, for local patrons. Bonfires would roar on election day. The Depression was taking its toll.

  The novelist James Salter, in his lyrical memoir Burning the Days: Recollection, captures the texture of life on the Upper West Side in the 1930s. Born in 1925, Salter lived on West End Avenue as a boy. “In the city that first took shape for me there were large apartment buildings stretching as far as one could see in either direction. On the side streets were private houses, many of which had been divided into rooms. Along Riverside Drive stood unspoiled mansions, stranded, as if waiting for aged patriarchs to die.”

  He continues: “In the bleak back courtyards men with grinding wheels sometimes still appeared, ringing a bell and calling up to housewives or kitchen maids for knives and scissors to sharpen.” (In 2017, a knife-grinding truck would still pass through the streets, alerting residents with a ringing bell.) “Nature meant the trees and narrow park along the river, and perhaps one of the rare snowstorms, with traffic in the streets dying and the silence of the world wrapping around. Newsboys, so-called though they were men, often walked along late in the day shouting something over and over, Extra! Extra!, someone murdered, something collapsed or sunk.”

  This was the world of the Penfield clan, and the younger children reflected the contradictory quality of the neighborhood. To their disgrace, this upright family soon had something in common with McMahon, Manning, and company: arrest records. Two grandchildren of the Penfield patriarch, the second president of Goodyear tire, turned to petty crime. Marguerite Penfield, the teenage daughter of Harold and Anna, and granddaughter of Raymond Penfield, was arrested in 1930 for stealing two bottles of perfume, worth $25, from Macy’s while she was visiting from Chicago. She said she wanted to give them as Christmas presents to her aunt, the wife of James Penfield. (James and his wife were living at No. 336 at the time.) Marguerite told the judge that her grandmother did not give her money to buy presents and that she stole the perfume on impulse. The charges were dismissed.

  John Bastedo, another grandson and the son of Aaron and Julia, became a more ambitious thief. He began his criminal career at sixteen in 1936 in California, with auto theft, and was later arrested for burglary in Schoharie County, near Albany. In 1939, while living in Long Island City, Queens, he was charged with stealing cash, securities, and jewelry worth $5,000 from his grandmother during visits to No. 336. He pleaded guilty to grand larceny. A few months later
, he was placed on probation for stealing another $6,500 worth of his grandmother’s jewelry. In July 1940, Bastedo pleaded guilty to forging his grandmother’s signature on two checks, for $150 and $50. Grandma Minnie had a soft spot for John. It must have been wrenching to be victimized by a beloved grandson, and one wonders about the kinds of excuses he offered her. Despite the forged checks, the stolen money, and the lifted jewels, she pleaded for mercy for her twenty-year-old grandson. But it was to no avail. The judge sent Bastedo to the Elmira Reformatory, the alma mater of Bernard McMahon, who six years earlier had died two doors away from Bastedo’s grandmother’s house.

  CHAPTER 17.

  Breakthrough

  AT THE BEGINNING OF FEBRUARY 1937, two key members of the Rubel robbery team, John Oley and Percy Geary, were under arrest—charged with the O’Connell kidnapping, not the robbery. They refused to cooperate with New York City detectives pressing them for details on the heist. But prosecutors had another route: Thomas Quinn, the boatman. It had been a struggle. First Quinn admitted owning the getaway boats, but denied knowing they were used in a crime. Then he acknowledged being aware they were to be used in some sort of criminal caper, but said he was not involved. Finally, probably confronted with witnesses who put him in John Oley’s company, he went a step further, admitting that the Oley brothers had used one of his boats in the heist.