Mafia Cop Killers in Akron

by Mark J. Price

  Patrolman Edward J. Costigan walked the district for most of the three years that he had been an Akron officer. The unmarried thirty-nine-year-old cop lived on Mount View Avenue with his widowed mother, Catherine, and four of his six sisters from their nine-sibling Irish family. Before joining the force, he worked in the mechanical department at the Akron Press newspaper.

  The six-foot, two-hundred-pound Costigan was a no-nonsense officer who commanded respect in the city’s “tenderloin district.” The Furnace Street neighborhood had more than one hundred homes, twenty restaurants, fifteen saloons, ten billiard halls, six hotels and dozens of small businesses, including grocery stores, coffeehouses, barbershops, cigar stores, meat markets, tailor shops and confectioneries.

  Patrolman Edward Costigan joined the force in 1914 and was a no-nonsense officer who commanded respect in Akron’s “tenderloin district.” From the Akron Beacon Journal.

  It’s another gray, sooty winter day in Akron in this 1919 view overlooking the rough-and-tumble Furnace Street neighborhood. Author’s collection.

  Quarrels, brawls, stabbings and shootings erupted with regularity on the street. One afternoon, Costigan heard a gunshot in the 120 block of Furnace and rushed to investigate. A young Italian man bolted out of a bar and complained that a neighbor had just tried to shoot him. While Costigan talked to the witness, the angry gunman walked up and shot the snitch dead. Bang! Just another day on Furnace.

  Costigan had no qualms about stopping suspicious-looking people and frisking them for weapons. The searches stirred resentment in the neighborhood because some immigrants felt they were being unfairly targeted. Behind the cop’s back, neighborhood ruffians began to call Costigan the “Red Policeman,” or “Red,” a disparaging nickname based on his ruddy complexion.

  Patrolman William McDonnell had known Costigan for most of his life and was his closest friend on the force. As youngsters in Akron, they attended grade school together and occasionally played hooky to go fishing. McDonnell joined the force on St. Patrick’s Day 1913, and Costigan followed his footsteps.

  “Big Will,” so called because of his 235-pound girth, walked an adjacent beat on North Howard Street from Federal Street (later Perkins Street, now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) all the way to the Gorge between North Hill and Cuyahoga Falls. “Anything could happen down there—and usually did,” McDonnell recalled years later. “We didn’t have cruisers or radios in those days, so I seldom got as far out as the Gorge. I usually had enough to keep me busy downtown.”

  When their shifts ended, McDonnell and Costigan usually met up at Furnace, the nexus point between their two beats, and walked back to police headquarters at South High Street and East Bowery Street. On the cool, clear evening of Thursday, January 10, 1918, they made plans to stop at the East Ohio Gas Company office on High Street to pay their heating bills. “It’s our last chance,” Costigan told McDonnell.

  Patrolman Joseph Hunt was a rookie officer of four months who had a wife and three young children. From the Akron Beacon Journal.

  Patrolman Joseph H. Hunt, a German American rookie who joined the force in September after working as a millwright at Quaker Oats, agreed to go with them. It had been a long day on Furnace Street. The thirty-three-year-old cop had paid a few visits to saloons to persuade unsavory patrons to stop “molesting women.” In one heated confrontation, a hoodlum warned Hunt that he had better watch his step in the neighborhood.

  The three patrolmen set off around 7:00 p.m., but a pedestrian stopped McDonnell to tell him that a drunken man was unconscious in the middle of North Street. McDonnell told Costigan and Hunt to go pay their gas bills and he’d meet them later that evening. It was cold and gloomy as the two cops walked north on High Street past the giant shed for Northern Ohio Traction & Light Company’s new interurban terminal.

  They did not notice three shadowy figures trailing them from Furnace Street. One stayed a block behind to serve as a lookout while the others quickened their pace. Costigan and Hunt were passing the Union Fireproof Storage Company at 41–45 North High Street when they were gunned down at 7:15 p.m. “We didn’t hear anyone following us,” Hunt later said. “In fact, we didn’t hear or see anything unusual until we were shot in the back.”

  Two men with .38-caliber pistols pumped steel-nosed bullets into the patrolmen from a few feet away while a third man watched from a distance. Hunt said he felt a twinge in his back and legs, wheeled around, drew his revolver and returned fire. “I guess I emptied it, but do not know whether or not I hit them,” Hunt said. “Probably I didn’t because I was becoming wobbly on my pins. I believe the three were Italians. Two of them wore dark overcoats and soft hats. I’m not sure about the third one, although I noticed that he wore a cap. They ran north on High Street.”

  Costigan was shot four times in the back and collapsed facedown on the red-brick street. Five bullets struck Hunt—two in the right leg, two in the left arm and one that pierced his intestine and gallbladder and exited below his navel.

  Marie Azar, who lived at 55 North High Street, testified that she heard gunshots, rushed to her front porch and saw two men run past while an officer fired at them. She hurried to Costigan’s body, but there was nothing she could do. “I thought if he was alive I would give him air, and then I called for help,” Azar said. “Hunt was staggering, ready to fall, when some men caught him. He said, ‘Well, boys, they got me.’ Then the machine came on the scene and took the officers away.”

  The patrolmen were rushed to Akron City Hospital, where Costigan was pronounced dead on arrival and Hunt underwent surgery. Police Chief John Durkin sounded an alarm: “Get every man tonight who cannot give a good account of himself. Get the men who killed Costigan and shot Hunt.”

  By the time Patrolman McDonnell got to North Street, friends had already carted off the intoxicated man, so the officer phoned headquarters from a call box around 7:30 p.m. and received the horrifying bulletin that two cops had been shot on High Street, only a five-minute walk from the police station.

  “I knew immediately that it was Ed and Joe,” McDonnell told a reporter the next day. “If I had been with them, I would have got it, too, and would have been in the morgue or hospital this morning.” He regretted not being with his comrades to fight the gunmen, though. “I think if I hadn’t gone back to tend to that drunk, the three of us might have at least wounded one of them,” he said.

  Sheriff Jim Corey served from 1914 to 1918. His office was in the Summit County Jail between South Broadway and South High Street. Author’s collection.

  Akron had never seen a frenzied manhunt like the one that transpired that weekend. Chief Durkin ordered every cop to hit the streets in search of the killers, turning the city into zones and scouring neighborhoods from block to block—beginning with Furnace Street. “Practically every foreigner in the city who could not give an account of himself during the period from 5 until 8 o’clock was rounded up and brought to headquarters as a suspect,” the Beacon Journal reported on January 11. “Coffee houses were visited, every saloon, pool room and other meeting place in the city was inspected and suspects gathered in.”

  Officers barricaded roads, halted drivers and searched vehicles. They stopped trains, frisked passengers and interrogated “suspicious-appearing characters.” Sheriff Jim Corey had Summit County deputies raid gambling parlors and shady resorts on the outskirts of town.

  Detective Bert Eckerman must have experienced ghastly déjà vu as he kept a vigil at Hunt’s bed less than three weeks after doing the same for Patrolman Guy Norris. Eckerman and H.B. Kerr, city editor at the Akron Press, interviewed a wheezing, moaning Hunt for details about the ambush. “I guess I’m done for,” Hunt told the men. “Ain’t it hell to be a policeman? And I’ve only been on the force four months. There’s the wife and three little kiddies, too.”

  Distraught wife Adale Hunt joined her husband at his bedside and tried to keep a brave face. She hadn’t wanted him to become a cop because she feared something terrible might hap
pen. During the first few weeks after Joe joined the force, she barely got any sleep at their Bellows Street home. Now her worst nightmare had come true.

  The officer battled valiantly for two days at the hospital, even showing signs of improvement, but the internal damage was too severe. Patrolman Hunt died at 10:00 p.m., Saturday, January 12, leaving behind his thirty-year-old widow and sons Leonard, eight; Louis, five; and Laurence, one.

  Bells tolled the next week as two patrolmen were laid to rest. Hundreds attended Costigan’s funeral Monday at St. Vincent Catholic Church, where Reverend John J. Scullen eulogized, “He not only proved his worth in the fulfillment of his duties, but the reflection of his whole life makes his fate the more appalling.”

  Pallbearers were Gus Baehr, Jack Cardarelli, Thomas Costigan, Charles Costigan and Patrolmen William McDonnell and Grover Starkey. Honorary pallbearers from the police force were Ed Heffernan, John Duffy, Frank McAllister, Patrick Sweeney, Patrick Conley and George Fatherson. “They were two of the best boys ever on the force,” Chief Durkin said.

  Costigan was survived by his eight siblings—Catherine, Margaret, Thomas, Anna, Bridget, Julia, Mary and John—and sixty-seven-year-old mother, Catherine, whose despair was so great that she died broken-hearted six weeks later. They were buried in a family plot at St. Vincent Cemetery.

  Hundreds gathered again Wednesday morning at St. Mary Catholic Church for Hunt’s funeral. In his eulogy, Reverend Joseph O’Keefe noted, “A little more of the law of God practiced in the everyday life of the world, more regard for the Ten Commandments, would make such terrible murders unheard of—for with regard for God’s law, civil law could be more readily enforced.”

  For the second time that week, McDonnell, Heffernan, McAllister and Starkey served as pallbearers, along with Officers Adolph Oberdoerster and Frank McGuire. “It is seldom we are fortunate enough to get a man like Costigan,” Captain Alva Greenlese said.

  Uniformed police led a somber procession to Holy Cross Cemetery, where Hunt was buried. Following the ceremony, the cops wiped away tears and returned to work. There was no more time to mourn. Gangsters were hunting Akron officers and had to be stopped.

  “We’ll get them,” Detective Eckerman vowed.

  KING OF THE UNDERWORLD

  While Hollywood villains flickered on the silent screens of Akron movie theaters, a real-life menace walked the streets. Rosario Borgia held the town in his powerful fist and tried to crack it like a walnut. Akron was the “City of Opportunity,” and Borgia seldom missed an opportunity.

  The twenty-four-year-old Italian immigrant ran the rackets with a ruthless band of gangsters whose illicit operations included gambling, prostitution, robbery, safecracking, extortion and murder. If other hoodlums tried to horn in on business, they disappeared. Akron newspapers published articles about unidentified men whose slashed, bludgeoned, bullet-riddled bodies were fished out of rivers or dug out of shallow graves.

  Borgia had so many aliases that no one could keep them straight: Russell Berg, Russell Burch, Mike Burga, Joe Filastocco, Joe Philostopo, Pippino Napolitano, Joe Neapolitan, Rosario Borge, Rosario Borgi and Rosario Borgio. It’s possible that none of those was his real name, although he listed his parents as Giovanni and Maria Borgi on at least one legal document.

  He was born in 1893 in the tiny village of Sant’Agata del Bianco, in Cosenza, Calabria, in southern Italy, and immigrated to the United States in 1910, arriving at New York’s Ellis Island aboard the ocean liner Duca d’Aosta and settling in Akron by 1915. Borgia pulled his first thefts as a little boy and was a hardened criminal by adolescence. He may already have been a killer, too. A tale whispered in Akron speakeasies was that Borgia fled Italy because he had murdered his uncle, a police officer who threw him in jail for stealing. Whether true or apocryphal, the story added to Borgia’s menace in America—stay away from that guy; he’ll kill anyone who crosses him, even relatives.

  Furnace Street gangster Rosario Borgia, a native of Calabria, Italy, wears a hat and a fur-lined coat in this 1918 police photo. Courtesy of Akron Police Museum.

  Borgia was a large man, solidly built, with a lightning temper and intimidating presence. He fought briefly as a professional wrestler before giving up the sport and pursuing other interests, namely women. The Furnace Street red-light district beckoned many Akron newcomers, and Borgia was no different. “White slavery” was a lucrative business, and Borgia wanted a piece of the action.

  Reverend Charles Reign Scoville, an Indiana evangelist and Hiram College graduate, warned Akron residents about the dangers of prostitution (and men like Borgia) during fiery sermons at a one-month tabernacle on Cherry Street in 1915. The preacher said that young women risked going astray through coquettish behavior that attracted evil-minded fiends. “Flirtation is next door to damnation, and the girl who sits in public rolling her eyes to see who’s looking at her is flirting as hard as she can,” Scoville said. Speaking against disorderly houses, Scoville told an Akron crowd:

  We must wipe out segregated districts and secure law enforcement. No big city has any more excuse for having a tenderloin section than a small country village. Not as much. Most inmates of these houses can say the Lord’s Prayer as well as you or I, and that makes me sick at heart. It shows that they were under the influence and teaching of good parents and a Sunday school some time in their lives. They have actually been stolen and there ought to be a life sentence for any man who steals a pure girl.

  Borgia’s first known arrest in the Midwest was on July 7, 1915, on a charge of taking an Ohio girl to Detroit for “immoral purposes.” Six months later, he married Filomena Matteo, twenty-five, an Italian immigrant, before Justice of the Peace Charles W. Dickerson on December 22 in Summit County. On their marriage license application, they listed their occupations as “restaurant owner” and “waitress.”

  Streetcar tracks run up the middle of North Howard Street in 1919. Looking north, this view is close to the site where Rosario Borgia operated his so-called restaurant. Author’s collection.

  The couple opened a “soft-drink establishment” in their home at 93 North Howard Street, not far from Furnace Street, and brought in young women to separate rubber workers from their cash. Filomena, who could not read or write English, dutifully turned over the money to her husband. Beat cops referred to Borgia’s wife as “Dago Rose,” an Italian slur, and suspected that she was serving more than soft drinks at the business.

  Borgia was livid when police conducted a Saturday night raid on the brothel on February 12, 1916. Patrolmen Will McDonnell and George Werne charged Borgia with keeping a questionable business, and they charged his newlywed wife and two other women with inhabiting it. They all were freed on $100 bail.

  Perturbed but undeterred, Borgia relocated the “restaurant” to Barberton’s Mulberry Street, where his wife continued to supervise the “waitresses.” Borgia, hardly a paragon of virtue, had the audacity to file for divorce in June 1917, alleging that his wife was “guilty of adultery several times.” The case was dismissed when the couple reconciled.

  Ostensibly, Borgia was a barber by trade and worked at a shop on Washington Street, but illicit activities were far more profitable. He diversified his criminal portfolio, surrounding himself with a band of young, like-minded Sicilians who excelled in breaking the law. Money, women, power—they could have it all if they followed Borgia’s lead. The gang liked to hang out at Joe Congena’s pool hall at 121 Furnace Street, where the men occasionally retreated to a back room to make big plans behind closed doors.

  The sledgehammered safe at the Acme store on North Hill? That was the work of the Furnace Street gang. The nightclub with the slot machines, punch boards and dice games? That cash went straight to the Furnace Street gang. The floating body in the Cuyahoga River? That guy knew too much and talked too much, so the Furnace Street gang had to silence him.

  Detective Harry Welch discovered that Furnace Street residents and business owners were too frightened to talk about gang activity
in the neighborhood. From the Akron Beacon Journal.

  Detective Harry Welch couldn’t find any Furnace Street residents or business owners willing to talk to officers about the escalating crime wave in the neighborhood. The locals feared for their lives and didn’t want to risk being labeled as squealers. Even when promised police protection, potential witnesses clammed up.

  “Victims of the plundering gang continued to shake their heads slowly and refused to identify anyone,” true-crime reporter Will H. Murray wrote decades later. “One shopkeeper showed Welch the gruesome drawing of a skull which he had found on his doorstep the day after he had been held up. ‘The sign of the Black Hand!’ he shivered. ‘To speak is to die.’”

  At least five unsolved murders were attributed to Borgia, but he was never convicted of any of them. Nobody wanted to be added to the list. “Rosario Borgia of Barberton is the ringleader of this band of Italian toughs,” theorized George Martino, an Italian American private detective from Akron. “He’s the typical Black Hand captain. He toils not, neither does he spin, and yet he’s always well-dressed and has plenty of money.”

  The flashy gang wore ill-gotten wealth on its sleeve, parading around in three-piece suits, silk shirts, flowery ties, wide-brimmed hats and polished shoes. Coiffed, dapper and clean shaven, Borgia led the way with roguishly good looks—an oval face, olive skin, black hair, dark eyes, prominent nose, full lips, jug ears, muscular shoulders and, truth be told, not much of a neck.

  The Akron Police Department takes mug shots of the Furnace Street gang in 1918. Clockwise from top left: Pasquale Biondo, Frank Mazzano, Lorenzo Biondo, Anthony Manfriedo, Paul Chiavaro and Rosario Borgia. Courtesy of Akron Police Museum.