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

by Daniel Wakin

  On January 29, the phone rang in the Times newsroom. Gilbert was on the line, complaining about that “s” at the end of the word “members.” He had treated only one man, he insisted, and he had been told that the man was shot accidentally. True, Gilbert said, he did not report the case, but he thought another doctor had already treated the patient (he made no mention of any threats). In any case, the patient had died before Gilbert could help, he claimed.

  Gilbert had other points to make. He said that Francis Madden, the assistant district attorney in the case, obtained the indictment against him but was himself “discredited and disbarred,” and that the indictment was eventually tossed out. Gilbert also claimed the Appellate Division allowed him to practice medicine while he fought the criminal charges. A memo to the file on Gilbert in the Times’s morgue concludes: “He did not want a correction, but wanted us to go easy on him if his name should come up again and not leave his indictment in the air.”

  Kress, one of only three people found guilty in the Rubel heist, appealed his conviction. The Appellate Division upheld it by a vote of 3–2, but on the last day of 1940, the New York State Court of Appeals, the higher court, overturned the ruling in a decision that came to be cited for years to come. New York law requires that the state present evidence to corroborate the testimony of an accomplice in a crime. For this reason, something more than Stewart’s say-so was needed to prove that Kress took part in the robbery. Barshay introduced two pieces of evidence to fit that bill: the $100 payment passed on from Kress to Stewart, supposedly for the burial of McMahon, and the identification of Kress by Schlayer, the mechanic who said he saw him in the boat during the “test run.”

  Neither was enough to satisfy the appeals panel.

  The law required that the corroborating evidence come from an “independent source of some material fact tending to show that defendant was implicated in the crime.” But Kress denied owing Stewart any money. That put the corroborating evidence, that Kress owed money for McMahon’s burial, in the mouth of the accomplice, draining it of any independence. The fact of a $100 payment was not enough. “Without establishing the reason for the payment and authority or knowledge and consent of Kress to the payment,” it did not count as corroborating, the opinion said.

  In the case of Schlayer, nothing showed that he knew about the proposed robbery. He could only state that he saw someone in the boat whom he later identified as Kress, who in turn denied being aboard. “It does not necessarily follow that the presence of Kress in the boat indicated that he took part in the robbery,” the court said. “Evil intent cannot be inferred.”

  Three months later, in March 1941, prosecutors decided not to retry Kress. The indictment was dismissed and Kress was freed.

  “My client was discharged,” Impellitteri told The New Yorker in 1948. “I really thought he was the victim of a frame-up, but what do you think he did? He went out and helped stick up Frank Erickson.”

  Frank Erickson was a major racetrack bookmaker who had gotten under the skin of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. He operated out of a nineteenth-floor suite at the New York Athletic Club, where sums of as much as $100,000 were said to be stored. Around 10:30 a.m. on April 24, 1941, Kress, Stephen Catlin, and Lyman Finnell, an ex-convict who served time in San Quentin and was wanted for parole violations, entered the club, intending to help themselves to Erickson’s money. Armed, they carried a leather briefcase filled with black masks, rope, picture wire, handkerchiefs, a roll of cotton, and ammunition as they headed for the elevator to go up to Erickson’s suite, 1903-4. But when the elevator door opened on his floor, and the thieves saw Catherine O’Brien, a fifty-two-year-old chambermaid, they decided to improvise. They ordered her to open the suite with her passkey. When she refused, they followed her into a room across the hall, grabbed her, and tried to take hold of the keys. The maid fought back, succumbing only after Kress pistol-whipped her.

  In the struggle, the telephone receiver fell off the hook and the switchboard operator heard the fracas. The elevators were halted and a bellboy ran out of the club looking for the police. Two responded: Officer George Schuck, walking his beat at 59th Street and Seventh Avenue, and Officer Charles Kilka, who was writing parking tickets on the block.

  Schuck went to call for backup just as the robbers ran down the service stairs. He followed them into the street and ordered them to surrender. They responded with gunfire, and Schuck was wounded. Kress and Catlin headed east on 58th Street, and Finnell west on 59th Street.

  A car was waiting at a stoplight, and Finnell jumped in, ordering the driver to hit the gas. Instead, he yanked the keys from the ignition and ran. Finnell went to the car stopped behind, which was driven by a chauffeur with his employer, Mrs. Samuel Solomon of Central Park South, in the back. Finnell slid in next to her and demanded that the chauffeur move—but he too jumped out. Finnell moved into the driver’s seat, grabbed the wheel, and began driving. Officer Kilka, his pistol drawn, jumped on the running board. Finnell pointed his gun at his own head and fired, killing himself. The car continued crazily for another fifteen feet, sideswiping two other vehicles and injuring a pedestrian, before coming to a stop, presumably terrifying Mrs. Solomon on the wildest ride of her life.

  Meanwhile Catlin disappeared into the coffee shop at the Hotel Maurice, at 145 West 58th Street. Kress was eventually arrested and appeared the next day at a police lineup, a diminished figure in a blue overcoat several sizes too big. During the lineup, he had an exchange with police Captain Fred Zwirz. After Kress denied involvement, Zwirz said, “You were seen running away from the crime.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Kress answered.

  “Were you ever arrested before?” Zwirz asked

  “I don’t know,” said Kress, who had a record of fourteen arrests.

  “Would you tell the truth if you knew how?” Zwirz spat out.

  Kress replied with a slow shake of his head.

  Erickson later gave praise to the chambermaid. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”

  Catlin was eventually arrested, tried, and sentenced to life in prison as a repeat offender. Kress pleaded guilty and received a seven-and-a-half- to fifteen-year prison term back at Sing Sing. “I look upon you as one of the finest examples of the fact that crime does not pay,” Judge John Mullens said at the sentencing, making a reference to Kress’s role as the family black sheep. “You come of a decent family, but you have been ‘cutting the corners’ of the law for a long time—and getting away with it. I think you are one of the cleverest crooks ever to be arraigned before me, but the law finally caught up with you.” He was referring to Kress’s long arrest record, including one for the Rubel heist, and limited experience of a prison cell.

  Incredibly, after serving his time for trying to rob Erickson and after barely escaping a long prison stretch for the Rubel heist, Kress could not stay out of trouble. He was implicated in the 1955 robbery of a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Woodside, Queens, that netted $305,000. Even more amazingly, one of his two accomplices was reported to be one Archie Stewart, his old partner in crime and courtroom nemesis. Neither was ever arrested in the robbery. But it is not without some irony that newspaper accounts described the stickup as meticulously planned. It was also called the largest haul of cash from a bank heist in United States history.

  As fellow inmates at Alcatraz, John Oley and Percy Geary left behind a voluminous paper trail, probably thanks to Alcatraz’s mythic status—inmate records have been carefully kept and are publicly available. Oley stayed at Alcatraz until his transfer to Leavenworth in 1953. He ended up in the penitentiary in Atlanta, from which he was released on parole with incurable cancer on January 5, 1957, having spent nineteen years in federal prison for the kidnapping of Butch O’Connell.

  FBI reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act depict a sad final coda to the life of Oley, the notorious onetime rumrunner, “Legs” Diamond associate, kidnapper, and holdup man.

  After his release, Oley r
eturned to his old haunts, living in Ballston Spa, New York, near Albany. He worked for a spell as an instructor for the International Correspondence School. Two years into his newfound freedom, he decided to make a last-ditch effort at generating some income. He called on an old comrade from prison: Eugene Dennis, the general secretary of the Communist Party USA and a well-known figure—he had graced the cover of Time magazine in 1949. They were an odd pair, but prison makes for strange connections. Oley was in for kidnapping; Dennis had been sentenced to five years after being convicted under the Alien Registration Act, which proscribed advocating the overthrow of the government.

  Dennis was released several years before Oley. But the FBI was still keeping tabs on the Communist official, and Oley made a brief appearance in the surveillance record. On October 9, 1959, shortly before Dennis himself was to receive a diagnosis of lung cancer, Oley showed up at Dennis’s office at Communist Party headquarters at 23 West 26th Street to discuss a possible job at the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. “During this conversation, it was also indicated that Dennis had ‘done a lot for John’ and his close friends while in prison and that they appreciated it,” an FBI report dated January 2, 1959, recounted. (It’s not hard to imagine that Dennis provided legal advice, instruction, outside connections, or reading material.) Oley appeared to be deferential, almost sheepish in his request. “He told DENNIS that he realized he should not have come to CP Headquarters as he did not want DENNIS to become involved and promised he would not make a nuisance of himself,” another FBI report said.

  Dennis could not come through. The Daily Worker, already unable to pay existing employees, could not afford to hire him, the party leader said. The FBI agents handling the Dennis surveillance had to make a decision. Should they monitor Oley too? With no job at the party organ, a lack of involvement in Communist politics, and impending mortality, Oley was deemed unworthy of further notice. He died on March 19, 1960, and was buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Ballston Spa. His widow, Agnes, applied for and received a military headstone, a privilege granted because of Oley’s service in the Navy. She chose the cheapest option, a small bronze marker.

  Geary’s end was even more pathetic. He too served time at the Atlanta penitentiary, having transferred there from Alcatraz in 1955, a fifty-two-year-old convict whose threat to society had run its course. As his release date approached, Geary was apparently overwhelmed by the prospect of surviving on the outside after spending much of his adult life in prison. On July 16, 1959, Percy “Angel Face” Geary, aged fifty-seven, threw himself under the wheels of a prison laundry truck. His chest was crushed. The death certificate listed Josephine Geary as his wife and brewery salesman as his occupation. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Graceland Cemetery in Albany.

  And the money that ten men had so carefully planned to steal? As we have seen, Geary and Oley spent much of their shares on lawyers to defend themselves in the kidnapping case. Stewart blew his on the high life. McMahon’s was probably passed on to relatives after his death. Extortionists apparently relieved Quinn of most of his cut. Where the rest of the cash went, if there was any, is unexplained.

  CHAPTER 20.

  The Fates of Townhouses: “Life Is Particularly Difficult”

  NOT TWENTY YEARS AFTER NOS. 330–337 Riverside Drive were built, the stage was set for their atomization. Landlords took advantage of a change in the housing laws to chop up noble homes into cramped apartments and warren-like rooming houses. The Depression’s toll cost people their homes or ruined their ability to pay for large apartments, and many of the townhouses in the area found a market in lodgers sharing bathrooms and kitchens. After World War II, the Upper West Side embarked on an era of decline, and by then the aspirations for Fifth Avenue elegance on Riverside were long gone. Shabbiness and crime marked the era in the following decades. The end of the war also coincided with the close of an era of family ownership of the townhouses on our stretch of Riverside Drive, and also something of a religious conversion. Three of the homes fell out of the hands of clans that had held them for three generations. Two, Nos. 330 and 331, were sold to religious organizations, Buddhist and Catholic.

  Yet even as the city’s social organization and economy frayed, the Seven Beauties held strong, impassively watching society’s changes as they slid into genteel decrepitude. After the unholy destruction of Pennsylvania Station in 1963, the disappearance of old New York seemed ever more possible. Alarmed by the prospect of wiping out old, stately, beloved buildings, in 1965 the city created the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has the power to protect neighborhoods from the ravages of overdevelopment. Almost immediately, efforts were undertaken to confer landmark status on the seven Riverside Drive buildings as part of a larger protected precinct. The commission established the Riverside-West 105th Street Historic District in 1973, encompassing the Seven Beauties and another twenty-three buildings on 105th Street and one townhouse next door to 337 Riverside Drive.

  In the years leading up to landmark status, the Davis-Jephson family played the largest role in keeping the buildings alive. The southern bookend of the row, 330 Riverside Drive, stayed with Lucretia Davis and her husband, George Jephson, until shortly after George died, in 1951. The couple had no children. At his death, Jephson left an estate worth about $5.2 million, including a trust fund for half the amount, which provided income for the rest of Lucretia’s life. (Lucretia had her own fortune.) Lucretia outlived her husband by twenty-eight years, dying in Manhattan in 1979 at the age of ninety-three.

  Jephson stands out as one of the more decent people to inhabit the Riverside Drive townhouses. He was just the man to spend his life with Lucretia, whose early adulthood was consumed by the bitter separation of her parents. Just one example of his habitual thoughtfulness and courtesy: George wrote a thank-you note to his physical therapist at the New York Athletic Club for his ministrations, assuring him that no offense was ever taken at the man’s criticisms and corrections of posture and breathing and that he never caused him any pain. His gestures rose above mere politeness. A bond of affection grew between George and his brother-in-law Harry, Lucretia’s beloved sibling. In 1944, when Harry’s son Joseph was serving in the Canadian military, Harry became ill and depressed after an unknown illness. George wrote him a letter that is a model of empathy and grace:

  “Naturally you think of Joe and the hazards to which he is exposed and you think of a hundred other matters which make the burden hard to bear in addition to the physical discomforts.

  “The stress and strain caused by this frightful war has a baneful effect on our minds and nerves and I am no exception. Those who are younger seem to be able to take it in their stride. We who can compare these times with those of former days find it hard to foresee the final outcome and we are therefore greatly depressed when we reflect upon our responsibilities to those we hold dear. We need courage and fortitude and a will to see it through. Brace up Harry. Make up your mind to fight it out and win. Set your mind on getting well and thus co-operate with all those who want you to get well and who are ready to help you in doing it. We will stick it out with you and never let you down.”

  George went on to write of problems with his business and frustrations and disappointments amid the daily grind. He recalled a story Lucretia told of how Harry would always try to throw a ball over the top of a tall poplar in Montour Falls, the family’s home town. “You did it because you were determined to do it. Try to give the same slant on getting well and you will get well.” (Harry eventually recovered.)

  In 1946, Jephson had established a trust to provide scholarships for college students, and Lucretia Davis, who had never gone to college, left money in her will so that other women would have that opportunity. Donations went to small schools upstate including Keuka College and Cazenovia College, named after the town near Syracuse where Lucretia’s father, Robert Davis, the Baking Powder King, built an estate in 1905, the same year he acquired 330 Riverside.

  Under Jephson, the Da
vis concern cemented the ubiquity of its baking powder with lavish advertising. It was selling up to 35 million cans of the stuff by 1934, and more than half of the baking soda sold in the New York area came from Davis. In fact, a federal court said in a trademark case that the name had become almost synonymous with baking powder. Lucretia did not keep the company for long after George’s death. Penick & Ford Ltd. bought the business in 1955. Penick itself was gobbled up by R. J. Reynolds in 1965, and the brand was shuttled around corporate America. It most recently belonged to a stable of baking powder brands owned by Clabber Girl of Terre Haute, Indiana—a subsidiary of Hulman & Co.—which also owned, of all things, the Indianapolis Speedway.

  Lucretia lived out her final years at the Cazenovia estate in the summer, and in hotels, mainly the Surrey, in New York City in the winter. She frequently bestowed gifts on her friends and relatives—a pendant here, a pocket watch there, cash sums—and set up numerous small trusts for them. A personal thank-you note from President Nixon in 1973 suggests that he too was a recipient of her largesse. An accounting in shaky script of her safe deposit box at an old Chemical Bank branch includes a long list of diamond bracelets, earrings, rings, and brooches, liberally sprinkled with emeralds and sapphires, along with her father’s and husband’s watches. It is a ledger of opulence. In her final years, Lucretia reworked her will several times to adjust and add various bequests to her circle. At one point, she asked her lawyer how much he would like to inherit. The tactful man demurred, saying it was her decision.

  Another attorney, Bob Taisey, who as a young trust and estates lawyer helped handle her legal matters, described Lucretia as a shy, retiring woman, with the naïveté that comes from a long-sheltered life. An opera buff, she had a box at the Metropolitan Opera, occasionally taking lawyers from Taisey’s firm to performances after her husband died. Lucretia was not just a patron: she took singing lessons into her eighties.